I’m not worried about meat/milk from cloned animals... I’d want to know it was from cloning, but other than that, it doesn’t bother me... Maybe with cloning, we can get rid of things like Mad Cow, Foot and Mouth disease, etc...
I don’t think so — at least, not yet.
We still don’t know enough about TSE’s (transmissible spongiform encaphalopathies — a generic way to describe all of them — BSE, scrapie, CWD, CJD, etc) to know how they transmit yet.
FMD — FMD suffers from two problems: it mutates rapidly, and it spreads even more rapidly. So even if you could breed animals that would resist a specific serotype of FMD, there would be a new one to come along pretty quickly.
What you’d see with cloning is that rather than go through the laborious genetic selection for desired characteristics in (let’s use cattle as an example), once you hit a “winner” in the genetic lottery, you’d clone that animal, rather than use it in a breeding program hoping that the traits that made it a profitable animal were heritable.
Do a google for sperm sales in beef production. When you look at the ratings on each animal, you’ll see a term “EPD” — Expected Progeny Difference. What you’d ideally like to have when you hit a winner of a bull is that all male offspring from that bull would be winners too. But it doesn’t work like that, since the cow has some input into the situation.
With cloning, you’d have a new bull every X years, with the same (exactly the same) winning traits.
Now, where the problem will come is that when you start getting a lot of cloning going on, you lose heterogeneity that leads to “hybrid vigor” — which in animal herds provides something of a natural firewall against diseases coming into the herd and spreading like wildfire. Cloned herds will be highly susceptible to that one mutation of a disease that will waste the entire herd at once.
I don’t think you’ll see cattle/sheep/pig/etc producers jump on this cloning issue too much outside specific animals with outsized winning traits. ie, you’d see this in genetics producers’ herds, but not in production herds. If we do see it in production herds, we’ll quit seeing it as soon as there is some disease that wipes out entire cloned herds because of the lack of heterogeneity and the producers’ grandpappies tell ‘em “There was a reason why we crossed cattle... and you’ve just re-discovered it.”