The idea of creating a DNA bank of different species is a great idea in many regards, not only that we could recreate them later, but also so we can study and better understand their traits and characteristics. Cloning is a different issue though. The thing with cloning is that it's basically copying. Now there's nothing really wrong with copying, but there's a problem. If you ever copied a page from a textbook in a copy machine, odds are you only got the page you copied and not the whole book. This is because what you copy isn't a completely accurate representation of the object that you're copying. Remember Dolly? She was a cloned sheep, but she wasn't a good sheep. She was sick, her brain didn't work like a normal sheeps', and she died much sooner than she should have. It was a great experiment, and scientifically, a milestone, but then we reach the ethical territory. Even if the cloning is going to create more of a dwindling species, they wouldn't be the "good" specimens of that species we would be trying to save. Imagine if we cloned a human. From all gathered evidence so far, we would get a human, but it would be severely mentally disabled. Many people would protest this, because a prevalent opinion is that it's "wrong" to create something like that that will be incomplete. There are parents who get abortions because tests have shown that their child will have a mental defect. Whether this is because of personal pride, inheritance issues, or pity doesn't really matter. People think that it's wrong to create someone that's basically retarded. (sorry if that offends anyone, there's no other way to put it and i'm not trying to be offensive.) Now translate that to animal rights activists. Can you see why people wouldn't want it?
