  So what does explain the public’s negative reaction? Baylis and Robert speculate that people object to chimeras because they accept the Moral Confusion Argument, according to which it is wrong to create chimeras because of the moral confusion that would be generated by the existence of individuals that cannot be definitively classified as human or as non-human (ibid., 9). This moral confusion would arise because people employ two distinct frameworks for understanding moral status: if an individual is a human being, then it has full moral status, and it has that status independently of anyone else’s attitudes or intentions regarding it, but if an individual is a non-human animal, then it does not have full moral status, and, further, the moral status it does have and the nature of the obligations we have towards it are contingent upon the attitudes and intentions of their human creators or overseers. For a borderline human/non-human chimera, it would not be clear which framework to employ and, consequently, it would not be clear what our moral obligations to this entity would be. Would it be appropriate to kill it for food, or would that be murder? Which set of biomedical research protections would apply, the relatively weak constraints on animal research or the comparatively strong constraints on human subjects research?