In vitro cloning and animal testing

There was a very good thread discussing animal testing with sound and not too heated discussions - www.abovetopsecret.com...'

I pulled some of my old bio-ethics texts for a quick scan and would like to bring a topic up for discussion that was kicked around in the text. That being, IF we are able to clone and in vitro raise an animal, would that:

A. Make animal testing acceptable?

B. Make human consumption of animals OK?

I'm basically asking, is the natural birth part of the equation undone by a true in vitro growth and "birth"? Not the cloning possible today which still requires implantation in a host but true in vitro, from start to finish. It's most definitely not natural and that individual critter was created by our hand so does that make it OK?

We are nowhere near this today (scary - shade of humans in The Matrix...) but it is likely to assume that the technology will be available at some point in the future....

NO

Being a cloned animal makes it no less feeling of pain and fear. Therefore using cloned / in vitro animals makes no difference to moral objections. Nor does it make any difference to scientific objections because the cloned animal is still an animal biologically, and a poor model for human study.

Nor does it make eating animals a different proposition since if you argue from a moral prospective, than animal still must die for the purpose and the method of slaughter and the manner of its existance (natural v's unatrual) preslaughter is still the issue regardless it was born or deliberatly created.
Weather folk are more comfortable with the idea of animals for food that are created for that purpose is another matter, personally i dont see a difference weather you breed them or clone them, they are still living feeling beings.

Perhaps if science could grow lifeless meat (no brain function) in a lab, this might have bearing on acceptability as food, however the idea is a bit obscene, and realistically, even if it was accepted, it would be rather difficult to produce meat this way on a commercial scale to meet the demand natural; animals currently fulfill.

[edit on 033131p://07123 by instar]

NO...that's an absurd notion all together. As instar stated...just because it's cloned means that it's ok to inflect suffering on a living creature...I think not....our society will not advance until we learn compassion for the creatures we share our planet with....

I know people will hate this but every plant you ingest has been "killed" along with a whole host of symbiotic and parasitic critters. Plants do live and breath (co2 in o2 out) so if all killing is wrong how is that OK?

If you say they do not feel pain because they have no brain or are not animals, well pain is just a neurochemcal response to a stimuli and there are a whole host of critters that we all "kill" on a daily basis that meet that definition - ant, flys, spiders etc. They have a brain that reacts to stimuli (heat, etc.), and that to me represents pain and feeling as it is a neurochemical response.

This to me represents the circular argument often cited emotionally and in my eye hypocritically - we all kill things - daily, so where does that line get drawn and which one of us makes that moral call?