Thursday, Aug 21, 2008
Humane groups oppose cloning dogs for pets. But we've been designing dogs to suit our whims for generations. Why stop now?
Nov 5, 2005 | Shadow Anne is a dog adored. "She is smart, very independent, graceful, beautiful and elegant," says her owner, Marianne Schlegelmilch. "She likes to stand on the second-story beam of our house, gazing over her kingdom, with her long ears blowing in the wind -- sort of like Kate Winslet in 'Titanic.' She is a diva."
Shadow Anne is an Afghan hound, an aristocratic breed designed to be thin, hairy and refined. Afghans may lag behind labs and retrievers in popularity, but they recently secured a spot in history as the first canine to be cloned. In August, South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang and his colleagues announced they'd successfully produced an Afghan hound clone, dubbed "Snuppy" for "Seoul National University puppy." The cloning milestone grabbed the public's attention. This wasn't just another Dolly the sheep. This was man's best friend.
"It would be really hard to replicate the life experiences that made Shadow who she is today," says Schlegelmilch, of Homer, Alaska. "Still, if I could clone her when she reaches old age, I might be tempted."
Schlegelmilch is not alone in her desire to keep her canine companion around indefinitely. In recent years, a trio of pet-cloning companies, Genetic Savings & Clone, ForeverPet and Perpetuate, have sprung up to meet the growing demand for carbon copies of Rex and Fluffy. Already the companies have a backlog of customers who have paid to store their pets' genes in the companies' freezers. So far, Genetic Savings & Clone is the only company that has cloned kittens for clients. (Recently it dropped the price from $50,000; a cat clone can now be had for just $32,000.)
Beneath the utopian science are some unsettling ethical questions about animal welfare and health. With city pounds across the country filled with homeless dogs and cats, should a person pay tens of thousands of dollars to essentially manufacture a new pet? Given that cloning is not a perfected science, is it premature to clone dogs and cats that could later suffer a bevy of medical problems?
The spotlight on cloning also illuminates the seldom acknowledged fact that, in many ways, cloning dogs and cats is redundant. We've more or less accomplished with breeding what cloning aims to create -- animals nearly identical in appearance and temperament. Since domesticating dogs from wolves more than 10,000 years ago, we've engineered the species to suit our needs and our whimsies -- border collies for herding sheep, malamutes for hauling sleds, teacup Chihuahuas for accessorizing starlets.
When it comes to dogs, "we've been doing seat-of-the-pants genetics for at least 12,000 years," says Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and author of numerous books on dogs. We did so, for the most part, with little knowledge of the underlying genetics. Today, sophisticated geneticists are tinkering with dog DNA in all sorts of ways. Some experiments are resulting in key cures for canine afflictions. And cloning, which at first glance may seem a quintessential act of human vanity, could become a reliable method for duplicating ideal pets.
Snuppy was created by somatic cell nuclear transfer, the same technique that produced Dolly the sheep. The genetic material is sucked out of donor eggs and replaced with DNA taken from skin cells of the clone "parent." The resulting embryo is stimulated to divide with chemicals or electricity, then implanted into a surrogate mother.
From nearly the moment Snuppy was born, groups such as the American Anti-Vivisection Society, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Humane Society of the United States expressed their opposition. "There are millions of animals who are euthanized every year simply because they don't have a home," says Stephanie Shain, director of outreach for the Humane Society. "To clone a pet when there are so many animals that need homes, we think it's a technology that's completely unnecessary."
Not only is the technology unnecessary, Shain says, but it's imperfect and potentially dangerous. Cloning is extremely inefficient. To produce the first dog clone, the Korean team implanted multiple embryos into more than 100 surrogate dogs; only Snuppy survived. The lifespan and health of cloned mammals has also been called into question. Dolly, the famous first mammal to be cloned from an adult, suffered from lung disease and arthritis and was put down at a relatively young age. Whether her health problems were related to cloning is unknown.
Critics also contend that commercial cloning is consumer fraud, given that a clone won't be identical to the original pet. Although they will look alike and share the same genes, clones will grow up in different environmental conditions than the original animals, and have their own personalities and behaviors. Clones are essentially identical twins displaced in time. "There's no way to replicate an animal's personality," Shain says. "They're toying with these people's emotions."
Autumn Fiester is a senior fellow at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and the owner of a purebred bichon frisé. She believes the jury is still out on pet cloning and will be until we know more about the health of the clones. But, she says, "it seems like Genetic Savings & Clone, for its part, has produced healthy animals." In the meantime, she says, "the preliminary arguments made by the opposing camp are not strong arguments."
Fiester points out that spending $30,000 on an animal that may live 15 years works out to just a couple hundred dollars a month. We often spend that on other so-called luxury items, like going to the movies or dining out. And at the end of a month of fine dining, you aren't even left with an object -- let alone one that loves you unconditionally. "In principle it is not irrational to want a later-born twin of a beloved pet," Fiester says. "Clients can say, 'At least I have something left, a little bit of my animal for me to cherish.'"
For some pet owners, replacing a lost pet with an animal from a shelter isn't an acceptable alternative. "Pet owners do not want any old pet," Fiester says. "They are after a certain genetic constellation, a certain cat or certain dog."
One such owner is Kathleen McNulty, from Long Valley, N.J. She has banked her dog Riley's genes with Genetic Savings & Clone and has posted a testimonial on the company's Web site. "I am very sympathetic to homeless cats and dogs," she wrote. "I have a barn full of cats that have been adopted from shelters. But I had this one very special relationship with this one dog, and I know that I'm not going to find that relationship with a dog that I get out of a shelter."
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