text: are all those weird cats and dogs genetically modified organisms? the incredibly small, wrinkled, hairless or flat-faced ones. they would have never evolved the way they are without human intervention. does that make them gmo? i think some of these answers may have too narrow of a definition of "genetically modified." what if we definite it broadly as "getting the genes we want into the organisms we want"? choosing the parents of any organism then is "genetic modification." sexual reproduction and recombination are natural processes of genetic modification in animals and plants, as are hybridization and lateral transfer of dna (through transposible elements, etc.).  the forms of genetic modification that some people object to -- taking dna fragments containing genes of interest from one species and inserting them into another species -- occurs along a continuum with "normal" recombination.