Updated June 2008
Written by Brian Hansen, Updated by Torah Kachur

Tags: technology, cloning

Copy Cat
Pet cloning companies used to be movie stuff—like the company RePet in the movie The 6th Day. Today, some people are preparing for its reality. We kid you not. In 2004, headlines in the popular press announced, “California Woman Pays $50,000 to Clone her Pet Cat”.

The cat’s owner Julie (last name withheld due to potential anti-clone backlash) paid a California company–Genetic Savings and Clone–this big stack of cash to clone a new pet from the DNA of her cat Nicky who died the previous year at the ripe old age of 17.

According to Julie, the kitten (Little Nicky) is just like his predecessor (dead Nicky). “He’s identical,” says Julie. “His personality is the same.” (Source: Associated Press). Three years later no one has heard from Julie or Little Nicky. Plus, Genetics Savings and Clone has gone out of business and no one has entered the pet cloning business since.

That has not stopped hoards of other pet lovers who are ready to make ‘re-pets’ or ‘fabricats’ out of their Fidos, Rexes, Sparkies and Eddies. Companies have popped up that provide ‘cryostorage’ of your pet’s tissue in case anyone eventually wants to clone their pet.

Pet owners assume that their cloned pet will be a carbon-copy of the original; but there are a number of complex factors that determine 'individuality' in a pet (let alone a human), and many of these factors are environmental. Although the cloned pet may resemble the original, the chances are that, given the different environmental influences it's bound to encounter, the clone could turn out to be quite different indeed from the original.

To Clone or Not to Clone?
The so-called benefits of pet cloning are presented on the PerPETuate website “Cloning is the ultimate breeding technology… Cloning removes the luck factor: clones are genetic duplicates and of the same sex as the donor pet!” But all scientists and mothers of twins would agree – just because twins share the exact same DNA does not make them identical.

There has been some cloning success since Little Nicky, the disgraced South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk cloned Snuppy the Afghan hound. But it took the team 2,000 eggs and 1,000 embryos to get one cloned dog. The huge lack of efficiency of cloning does not help a company’s bottom line. Thus, no private company has waded into the waters of private pet cloning since Genetics Savings and Clone closed its doors.

The lack of commercial success in private pet cloning has not stopped companies like PerPETuate and ViaGen who are banking on cloning being big business in the near future. Both of these companies don’t actually do any cloning; instead they are a place for people to store DNA of their loved pet just in case they wish to clone them in the future.

How long these people have to wait to have their new/old pet is still a mystery. Although some people seem to think it is worth the $1000 storage fee to wait for the technology to be perfected.

Besides curing a broken heart, potential benefits of cloning technology are praiseworthy when taken at face value. In hopes of replenishing a depleted population, an endangered wild dog, the sapsal dog, was cloned by a former lab member of Woo-suk. Most of us would agree with the need to protect and preserve endangered species – although most researchers think that the best way to save these animals from extinction would be to protect their remaining natural habitats. After all, how would cloning benefit an extinct/endangered animal (and its species) if it has no real place to live and none of its natural food to eat?

Endangered species aside, maybe there is a place for pet cloning in today’s world that goes beyond trying to replace a long-lost mutt. The same group that cloned Snuppy and the sapsal dog has also managed to clone narcotic and bomb-sniffing dogs for airport security. Despite the talents of your own pet, most dogs do not have the genetic abilities of an acute sense of smell and intelligence to become drug and bomb sniffers. In fact, only 10-15% of naturally bred dogs have the ability to become these highly specialized crime fighters.

If the recently cloned septuplet Labrador Retrievers, all named Toppy, have the right genetic makeup to become another line of defence against drug traffickers and would-be bombers than maybe some of the ethical worries about cloning will be eased.

Little Nicky cost $50,000 for a replacement pet which may be considered a good investment for some - and people can choose how to spend their money. But there may be large social costs with cloning technologies.

Some people disagree with cloning pets. The Humane Society sees pet cloning as:

• Deflecting attention from the serious pet overpopulation problem,
• Dangerous to the animals involved and
• An utterly misguided way to attempt to duplicate an animal’s uniqueness.

If your pet dies, do the right thing, the Humane Society says, and adopt another one from a pet shelter. Save a life and save your money.

Bringing Back the Dead
We would probably all agree that our responses to cloning—and even to the expressed need to clone—are informed by our particular moral values. Perhaps our specific take on the need to clone a pet roots very deep, right down into the parts of our psyche where we personally define relationship.

According to Lawrence M. Hinman, Director of the Values Institute and Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego, the attempt to replace a beloved pet (let alone a human loved one) by cloning is “a misunderstanding of the nature of relationships”.

In light of Dr. Hinman’s statement, perhaps we need to ask ourselves a few pertinent questions. Isn’t there practical worth in realizing that the life of every sentient being is unique and irreplaceable? Isn’t there also the potential to develop valuable moral strength– even deep compassion– by not retreating from the suffering life offers us? Does “adding to the body of scientific knowledge” ever justify cloning a deeply loved pet, let alone a lost child? Is it just a sophisticated excuse to strengthen the illusion that we have nothing to gain or learn from loss and that a life can simply be ‘replaced’?