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Tens of thousands of years ago the now iconic woolly mammoth roamed the ice covered land. Now we have only the specimens preserved in ice of these magnificent creatures but with the discovery of a new extremely well preserved woolly mammoth, an adult nicknamed buttercup, Korean scientists are looking to try cloning her. They believe that as long as they can properly care for the animal and give it a healthy life, they should clone her for the sake of learning more about these animals. However there is some strong opposition from the scientific community. The process of cloning would require an Asian elephant surrogate mother. This means there would be experiments done on the mothers and there's no guarantee they would come out of the pregnancy unharmed and may even die from it. Woolly mammoths, like elephants today, were social creatures and the cloned baby would have to live out a very lonely life. Woolly mammoths also live during a totally different time with drastically different climates. This animal would have to cope with that in addition to living in captivity.
As the saying goes, "just because you can do something doesn't mean you should." Yes we have the technology to perform cloning, and we have a beautiful specimen that may yield the necessary DNA to perform it but that does not no out weigh the reasons we should not perform this experiment. I am personally against this. I believe that no true good would come of it and to be honest there are more recently extinct animals that could be brought back without the same repercussions. The Thylacine might be a better starting point if there should be a starting point at all. Bringing back any extinct animal has its issues. I don't think it is worth the lives of Asian elephants (a species with problems of its own) to bring back an animal that, in all likelihood would not thrive.
(Also see the two Jurassic Park books and the three movies on why this might be a bad idea...)
I can see both sides of this argument; it would be very cool and would offer a great deal of new information about the woolly mammoth, but there are cons as well. Even though we are talking about animals and not humans, ethical decisions must still be made. For that reason, I tend to agree that it is not a great idea. The details regarding the climate issues and that the baby clone would be very lonely makes me think it likely would not be worth it.
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