Lately, my science class has been studying genetics and all kinds of genetic engineering. The class was assigned to choose from a variety of groups, and to join the one you felt strongly about. I joined the ‘friends of the animals’ group, and I learned a lot about how animals are treated when it comes to genetic engineering.

Animals have been experimented on in unnatural ways. For example, people been cloning animals, and creating them with technology. Also, countless lives of animals have been lost, thanks to testing. Obviously animals have been hurt in other ways, such as slaughter for their organs and for other various reasons.

I believe that this should stop, of course, there are a few exceptions... I think that it is unnecessary to clone animals unless it could somehow increase survival for humans. Scientists are considering cloning pets so that when somebody's pet is close to death, they can clone that pet and have that pet again. This is an example of something unnatural. If you clone your pet, they most likely wont have the same personality as your original pet, they'll just have the same genetic code. If somebody did this, then they wouldn't be respecting their original's pet's individuality. Animals are a lot like people, and they deserve just as much respect. If somebody cloned a pet, it would be just as bad as cloning a human child.

Cloning animals has had much failure in the past. When scientists were trying to clone Dolly the sheep, there were hundreds of failures. Hundreds of sheep could have lived if they hadn't tampered with them. What did they gain by cloning Dolly, I’d like to ask.

Cloning animals should be banned, because it's going against individuality. Pretty soon, it will be from animals to humans. If people could be cloned, lots of people would be born and not be original. People would feel used, merely a scientific experiment and nothing more. That would make our world full of people who feel like outsiders.

The exceptions to this statement are that some animals will have to be sacrificed for human survival. Only one example is, that if a human's organ wasn't functioning correctly, it would be worth it for an animal to be slaughtered so that scientists could perform the process where they put human genetics into the animal's foreign organ, so it won't be rejected by the body. Also, there are some reasons that animals should be allowed to be experimented on because it will increase human survival. I highly encourage stem cell research. Other than that I don't think there are any other reasons to experiment on animals, and cloning shouldn't go any further. A bored scientist shouldn't just experiment with cloning if there isn't any reason to do so. It would be better that way, if we limited experimenting.