Cloned Animals on "This American Life"

I'm an avid listener to radio, particular KQED radio, my local National Public Radio station, for which I'm also a contributor on their show called Perspectives. For those of you who know the NPR show, This American Life, you know that it's often moving, funny, thought-provoking, and just plain ol' entertaining. (Yes, NPR can be entertaining!) :)

It was such a thrill to learn a couple years ago that Ira Glass, the host and producer, became vegetarian when he visited Karen Davis' sanctuary for turkey, chickens, and other birds raised as "poultry." On a recent episode of the David Letterman show, Ira talks about this experience (though he plays it up for humor a bit), and he ultimately says he became vegetarian because he realized these animals had their own personality and interests and was tranformed into not wanting to eat them!

Now I realize that doesn't make Ira an animal activist, but nonetheless, it still gives (gave?) me hope that his own personal change of heart about animals would inform the stories he tells on his weekly show.

Perhaps if it were anyone else I wouldn't have been so utterly disappointed to listen to one of the segments from this past weekend and discover it was about a guy who prized his huge "bull" so much that, when the bull (named Chance) died, he was so distraught (he was also making money off of this bull - taking him around to BBQs (yes, BBQs) and other events for people to get their photo taken sitting on top of Chance) that he had him cloned.

In response, I wrote a letter to This American Life, and I urge you to do this same. My letter is below, and the email addresses to write to are web@thislife.org and ira@thislife.org. To learn more about the ethical problems around cloning animals, please read the American Anti-Vivisection Society's information on this issue.

Dear Ira and producers of TAL,

I wrote to you recently encouraging you to feature a show on the transformations that take place in people who awaken to the truth about animal suffering in our society - and how this transformation informs so much of your life once you know the truth.

Having said that, I was so disappointed to hear your recent show that featured someone who had their "prize bull" cloned - just because. The cloning of animals is a despicable example of humans tampering with the natural world for our own gain. Stories like the one you featured may sound funny and intriguing to your listeners, but absent from such entertainment is the behind-the-scenes look at how much suffering takes place to clone animals. Not only do the clones suffer from various types of diseases, age rapidly, and have many other complications, what is never talked about are all the failures that take place - the freakish results that cause great suffering to the "unsuccessfully cloned" animals - and to the females who have to bear these clones (who are often so large that the female dies or is in extreme pain during birth). Most people don't know that 96-99% of cloning attempts regularly cause death or severe health problems.

I'm just so sorry that you didn't consider the big picture when you decided to produce this story. The animals lose every single day, and even a show as seemingly harmless as yours has great consequences for a society that acts as if animals are here for us to use, to eat, to entertain us, to experiment on - and to clone. The more we stay desensitized, the more the animals suffer.

For the animals,
Colleen