Would you want to love your best friend again & again & again?

In 2005, the world welcomed its first cloned canine-Snuppy the Afghan Hound.  Great promises of replacements for our beloved pets, scientific breakthroughs in canine disease and research were all hailed as possible outcomes for the South Korean achievement. 

For the lay man out there, it’s hard to understand exactly what goes on, but I’ll try to explain in very brief terms.  DNA from the cell of the dog to be cloned is implanted into a donor egg.  Somehow (details are beyond the average person’s understanding, including me), this DNA fuses with the egg and triggers embryo growth.  The embryo is then implanted into a surrogate bitch producing a cloned puppy, born after normal gestation and whelping. 

The not-so-cuddly subject of cloning our canine buddies is one of ethical and moral contradictions.  By scientific standards, dogs are one of the more difficult animals to clone but equally the animal which humans are most attached to.  Allowing for the close human/canine bond, shouldn’t the process have progressed to large scale production at this point?  So we are led to an important question.  Why, 6 years on, has dog cloning not taken off on mass?  Why are rich folk all over the world not taking the opportunity to ‘bring back’ their beloved?

Interestingly, one lady did just that.  In late 2008, Bernann McKinney stumped up $50,000 to clone 5 copies of her beloved Pit Bull, Booger in South Korea.  Again in early 2009, a US couple tripled this figure to pay California firm BioArts International to clone their beloved Labrador, Lancelot.  Trawl the internet however for the multitude of people who’ve jumped on the cloning bandwagon, and they simply can’t be found. 

To think that cloning will bring your dog back to life exactly as he was in his previous existence is clearly a case of believing that nature alone, not nurture, has exclusive influence on how our dogs turn out.  There is an obvious dilemma that even if the dog produced is genetically identical to their original counterpart, I cannot see any way to exactly reproduce the upbringing of this dog.  I know for certain that my collie Sage (who I would gladly own again, and again), is who he is because of how I raised him and what he was exposed to in early life. 

This seems to be something which the average owner, in a round about way is fully aware of.  Their dog is part of their life, their day to day routine and their emotional state during a particular era, not something which they would want to recoup over again.  Essentially, ‘Buddy’ was their son’s best friend, or their shoulder to cry on when they divorced, contextually bound to those events.  Lou Hawthorne, CEO of BioArts International the US company who stopped canine cloning in late 2009, explained that even if cloning were free, the uptake would be surprisingly low.  Despite huge media attention, a ‘Golden Ticket’ competition for cloning the family dog run by his company in 2008, produced only 237 entries.

So, despite promises of great things, 15 years after Dolly the sheep and 6 years on from Snuppy the Afghan Hound, not only has science slowed in its canine cloning progress, it seems that the average human wouldn’t buy into the process anyway.  I’m glad of this.  If we can’t grasp the concept that there are enough dogs produced by natural means to go around for every needy owner, why oh why would be bring the complexities of cloning into the equation?  I had thought I would volunteer to bring prospective ‘parents’ of clones on tours of their local dog shelter before they signed their money away ….it seems I can put this project on hold.