Would You Want to Clone Your Dog?

White Poodle Sitting By a Stream (Courtesy: MobilityDog.org)

Of course, you love your pet! You also know that, like all mammals (humans included), she’s mortal. One day, she will die, and you’re sure you will be inconsolable.

But what if she isn’t mortal, at least not in the normal sense? Recent scientific advances make it possible for you to consider cloning Princess so that she (or at least her cloned offspring) can be with you forever or close to it.

Would you make that choice? There’s a lot to consider.

 

Animal Cloning is nothing New

The first successful animal cloning dates back to 1952, when scientists generated normal frog embryos through nuclear transplantation (extracting a nucleus from one cell and transplanting it into another). The same basic approach is used today to successfully clone a range of mammals, including mice, deer, cattle, pigs, cats, goats, rabbits, horses, and dogs.

The most famous successful cloning effort produced Dolly the sheep in 1996. Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. Before Dolly was born, this was thought to be impossible. Scientists believed that specialized adult cells, those with a certain job (like a skin cell or an organ cell), held genetic information pertinent only to that specific role. Scientists ultimately discovered genomic equivalence, meaning that an individual’s (yours, mine, and Princess’s) DNA sequence is identical in all cell types in a body. Dolly was grown from a single mammary cell containing all the information needed to create a whole new sheep.

The first cloned dog was produced in 2005 by researchers at Seoul National University in South Korea. They took an ear-skin sample from an Afghan Hound and produced two clones: Snuppy (a portmanteau of Seoul National University and “puppy”) and an unnamed twin that died after twenty-two days.

 

Gorgeous Gray Poodle with Golden Eyes (Courtesy: MobilityDog.org)

What Traits Can Scientists Reproduce with Clones?

The most obvious outcome of cloning is producing an animal nearly identical physically to the one cloned. Love Princess’s piercing blue eyes and cute underbite? Chances are good her clone will exhibit these same features. Some experiments have also produced clones with behavioral characteristics highly similar to the original animal. In maze tests, cloned dogs showed learning, memory, and exploratory characteristics similar to those of their genetic parents. In drug detection tests, dogs cloned from high-performing subjects outperformed naturally bred dogs.

Cloned dogs can also exhibit defects, however. Researchers have reported on cases of puppies born excessively large or with a cleft palate, fatal overdevelopment of musculature, or genital abnormalities. The precise reason for these mutations is unclear, but they do not surprise biologists. They likely result from epigenetic factors, such as the effect of non-DNA matter, such as proteins in the cell, that affect gene expression.

What cloning can’t do, however, is replicate the experiences of the original animal. Nature matters in the form of DNA, but so does nurture. Princess is a wonderful pet because of her countless interactions with people and animals and her life experiences. Those encounters are virtually impossible to repeat exactly.

 

What about the Ethical Issues?

Motivations for cloning vary across the range of animals produced this way. We seem ready to risk harming horses cloned to race, kill cattle for food, or shoot deer for sport. We feel differently about dogs, however. They are our companions, members of our families.

People willing to pay the price for a nearly exact replica of a beloved pet would probably deny that they are objectifying their dogs, viewing them as biological projects or toys that can be plucked out of the gene pool but don’t quite have unique identities of their own. Critics of cloning point out that, for each beloved pet that is cloned, two other (presumably less special) dogs must undergo surgery, giving up their eggs to produce a cloned embryo or their womb to nurture that embryo. Moreover, the cost of the process is not trivial: the only active cloning company in the United States, ViaGen Pets, will charge $50,000 to clone Princess.

This makes some wonder: How badly do we need individually tailored dogs when so many naturally born potential pets languish in shelters? Perhaps we should consider the benefit of saving a dog that already exists – a living bundle of unique genes and experiences – rather than manufacturing a replica pet.

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Pet CloningMobility Service Dogs - West Coast ProjectDog Cloning, Cloning animals, Dolly, Cloned Dogs, ViaGen Pets