World’s biggest animal cloning factory could save endangered species

NOVEMBER 25, 2015

by Brett Smith

A Chinese company called BoyaLife is set to build a massive animal cloning factory next year, and the people behind the project say it could help with everything from beef shortages to saving endangered species.

“We are going (down) a path that no one has ever travelled,” BoyaLife’s chief executive Xu Xiaochun told the Guardian. “We are building something that has not existed in the past.”

According to the company, the factory’s focus will be on resolving beef shortages. An official news release from the company said the factory is expected to generate 100,000 cattle embryos per year at first, and will eventually churn out as many as 1 million annually.

China’s demand for beef has been soaring in recent years, and cattle ranchers have been struggling to keep pace. A recent PriceWaterhouseCooper report found that China’s demand for beef has quadrupled since 1971. The proposed cloning factory is projected to meet 5 percent of today’s demand.

The great debate

In the US, the FDA and other stakeholders held a lengthy debate over making meat from cloned animals available for sale, and the FDA ultimately ruled the meat is safe to eat. However, only a certain amount of “cloned meat” is allowed, and the proposed Chinese factory would likely produce enough beef to easily blow through the American limit. Incidentally, cloned animals in the US are primarily used to prop up herds through breeding.

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