'Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Mammoths? De-extinction and Animal Welfare' by Heather Browning in (2019)
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 1-19 comments
De-extinction is the process through which extinct species can be brought back into existence. Although these projects have the potential to cause great harm to animal welfare, discussion on issues surrounding de-extinction have focussed primarily on other issues. In this paper, I examine the potential types of welfare harm that can arise through de-extinction programs, including problems with cloning, captive rearing and re-introduction. I argue that welfare harm should be an important consideration when making decisions on de-extinction projects. Though most of the proposed benefits of these projects are insufficient to outweigh the current potential welfare harm, these problems may be overcome with further development of the technology and careful selection of appropriate species as de-extinction candidates.
Browing argues
There are three methods through which de-extinction can be achieved: selective breeding, cloning and genetic engineering (Cohen 2014; Shapiro 2015). Each of these has different benefits and drawbacks and is useful for different cases. The first of these methods is selective breeding, or back-breeding. In this process, current relatives are selectively bred for those characteristics that defined the extinct species. For example, in order to re-create mammoths, elephants could be successively bred for their larger and hairier variations, until something closely resembling a mammoth is created. There are currently a few programs using back-breeding to attempt to recreate extinct species—projects attempting to bring back the quagga are selectively breeding zebras (Cohen 2014), and to bring back Auroch through selective breeding of modern-day cattle (Shapiro 2017). The process is limited by the availability of sufficiently similar relatives that are still capable of expressing the desired traits.
The second method is somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), or cloning. This requires the nucleus of a cell taken from a recovered member of the species to be implanted into an egg cell of a related surrogate species. This creates a zygote genetically identical to the donor animal of the target extinct species. The zygote is then gestated and birthed by the surrogate animal. A famous example of the use of this process was in the creation of ‘Dolly’ the sheep. This has also been attempted for de-extinction purposes, in the cloning of the Pyrinean ibex, or Bucardo, where a clone was made of the last living individual; though this clone did not survive long after birth (Cohen 2014). There has reportedly been some success in using this technique for creating new embryos of the extinct gastric-brooding frog (Cohen 2014). This process is only possible where entire cells of the extinct species are available, which is only the case for very recent extinctions, and where appropriate surrogate species can be identified (Shapiro 2017).
The third de-extinction method is genetic engineering. Here, DNA is recovered from preserved specimens of the extinct species. As it is almost never entirely intact, it is spliced with the DNA of a related species to create the closest possible genetic match to the original target. The spliced genetic material is then used to create a zygote to be gestated and birthed by an extant surrogate animal. Most current work on de-extincting mammoths is using this method, as the remaining mammoth DNA exists only in fragments. It is also the primary method in use for de-extinction of the passenger pigeon (Cohen 2014). This is what Shapiro (2017) considers the “most likely route to de-extinction” (2017, p. 4) as it only requires fragmentary DNA from the target species, which can then be expanded into a whole genome. It is limited primarily through availability of preserved DNA, which rules out long-extinct species, and like the cloning techniques, requires the use of closely related living species both for use of their DNA for gene editing, and as surrogate mothers (Shapiro 2017).
All of these methods for de-extinction are being used in current projects on various species, and each presents potential animal welfare problems, which I will detail in the “Welfare Issues” section. This is not merely hypothetical—de-extinction projects are happening now, and the welfare concerns for the animals thus created should be the focus of attention when evaluating these projects. ...
In the past few years, de-extinction has become the centre of increasing scientific and philosophical focus, with a number of books and papers published on the scientific feasibility of and ethical issues surrounding such projects. I will summarise these here, before moving on in the next section to examine the animal welfare concerns, which have not yet been given much attention in the literature.
Firstly, there is the question of whether or not the animals created through these methods count as members of the original species. Although they will be genetically similar to the target species, they will still have some differences in genotype, phenotype and development, that may rule them out as part of the species (Shapiro 2017). It is thus uncertain whether the species can really be said to have been brought back from extinction, or whether we have simply created a new, similar species to fill the same role. This question, and its implications, will be discussed further in the “Weighing Up Potential Benefits” section.
Another set of issues relate to scientific feasibility; whether the breeding and cloning methods can even work. Further, if animals are intended for reintroduction, this raises questions as to how we should select species such that they have the highest chance of success when reintroduced (Jones 2014). There are concerns as to whether the necessary environments for release still exist, and whether the animals can undergo the required behavioural training for release (Blockstein 2017). There are also legal issues, as to what the status of the de-extinct and re-introduced animals would be (e.g. native or introduced) and how this would affect conservation and protection legislation (Camacho 2015).
A number of papers have also addressed the ethical concerns of de-extinction projects, across a range of issues. For example, whether this sort of targeted ‘precision’ conservation is in conflict with a more wholistic form of ecosystem conservation (Adams 2017). There are suggestions that resources spent on de-extinction programs could result in decreased support for conservation of extant species, through loss of actual or potential sources of funding (Bennett et al. 2017). Campagna et al. (2017) are concerned that the discussion of de-extinction could “give the impression that extinction is reversible” and will therefore “diminish the gravity of the human annihilation of species” (2017, p. 48). Davis and Moran (2016) express concern that release of de-extinct species carries the risks of “invasiveness, disease transmission, and unforeseen species interactions” (2016, p. 3) and call for field research using similar surrogate species in order to minimise these risks. Another criticism of the process is that it is ‘unnatural’—both in terms of the technologies that are used to recreate the species, and in terms of the nature of the species thus created (Mason 2017). All these questions have already been well-explored and will not be re-examined further here; instead I will now turn to the issues of animal welfare arising from de-extinction projects.
Welfare Issues
Until recently, what has been absent in discussions of de-extinction is an exploration of the issues relating to the welfare of the animals created through these projects. Although mentioned briefly in many of the papers discussing ethical issues, animal welfare concerns are typically given only a few lines. These usually indicate that these issues are important but should not be difficult to work out, as they are the same sorts of issues that show up in other projects involving scientific research and species reintroduction. For example, Cohen (2014) brings up harm to animals as a potential source of negative utility in considerations of de-extinction projects but concludes “there is no reason to think de-extinction will cause a large animal welfare problem” (2014, p. 175). Sandler (2014) considers animal welfare concerns as a potential ethical reason against de-extinction projects but concludes “compared with the number of animals already used in research … conservation cloning does not pose a special or very large animal welfare problem” (2014, p. 358). Although he acknowledges that research should take care to minimise suffering caused, he thinks “the animal welfare concerns it raises do not significantly differentiate it from many other research and conservation practices involving animals” (2014, p. 358). Rohwer and Marris (2018) point out that “creating a mammoth is morally permissible … provided that suffering is minimal” (2018, p. 2, italics in original), and go on to describe some of the concerns with cloning, surrogacy and rearing; though again, follow Sandler in dismissing these as not much different from those in other similar conservation practices. Greely (2017) describes the potential welfare problems associated with cloning technology but considers that “the risks of de-extinction are not substantively different from those associated with gene editing” (2017, p. 34). Friese and Marris (2014) briefly describe some of the welfare concerns in the creation and rearing of de-extinct animals, and argue that “questions regarding animal care need to be understood as a crucial part of de-extinction experimentation, rather than downstream concerns” (2014, p. 2), however they conclude that these issues can be addressed through “a social science approach based upon the current realities of cloning, genetic engineering, back breeding, and species preservation today” (2014, p. 3).
Only Kasperbauer (2017) has really emphasised the importance of animal welfare considerations in making decisions about de-extinction programs, labelling it as “the most critical challenge for de-extinction” (2017, p. 1). He argues that “the current state of de-extinction technology provides good reasons to think the lives of de-extinct animals will indeed be full of suffering” (2017, p. 6) due to problems with cloning technology and reintroduction, and briefly outlines some of the ways in which these potential harms could come about. Here I will examine in detail exactly how and why these situations are likely to be harmful to animal welfare.
Although it is true that many of the welfare issues are continuous with those affecting other areas of animal research and conservation, I argue that de-extinction creates special issues for animal welfare that need to be considered when evaluating such projects. Welfare issues can affect the de-extinct animals, other animals used in the process (e.g. surrogate mothers) and the wild animals that will be impacted through reintroduction (Cohen 2014). In particular, there are welfare issues surrounding the cloning procedures when these are used, and in the process of captive rearing and reintroduction, beyond those usually faced by zoos or conservation bodies doing this sort of work. This is in large part due to the lack of knowledge about these species and their requirements.
