Daddy, buy me a clone!

This week, British members of Parliment and members of the Lords will gather for a second reading of a bill to allow genetically-modified (GM) embryos to be created for research purposes. This bill comes in the wake of the first successful creation of a GM human embryo at Cornell University, which took advantage of a lack of regulation on human cloning in New York State. More than a decade after the media spectacle surrounding Dolly the sheep, cloning seems to have fallen under the radar, while the legal environment surrounding it remains nebulous.

In the meantime, cloning has become an increasingly important tool for medical and public policy purposes in the developed world, with South Korea leading the charge. Last month, that nation’s customs office announced that its prize sniffer dog had been cloned to produce seven puppies that were genetically predisposed to detecting drugs. Earlier this year, the National Institute of Animal Science in South Korea cloned mini pigs, with organs intended as human implants. In February 2008, Korean company RNL Bio took its first order from a Californian woman willing to pay $150,000 to replicate her dead pit bull terrier, Booger, from some refrigerated ear tissue.

Questionable name choice aside, it’s Booger the bull terrier who seems to deserve particular attention here. He (I can only assume a dog named Booger is male) is in a different category to those carbon copies created in for medical and scientific research purposes.

Indeed, he represents the latest product of commercial pet cloning, a striking phenomenon that began in 2004 with a dead cat in north Texas. While the American firm that first cloned pets on the open market was shut down in 2006, the practice has hardly suffered or stagnated; in fact, Booger’s status as the first dog cloned for the consumer demonstrates clear sophistication and evidence of enduring demand amongst wealthy pet-owners in mourning.

Lifestyle Pets targets the same economic stratus with its hypoallergenic kittens (from $5,950), ready-trained “family protector” German Shepherds (from $85,000) and—most controversially—the giant “luxury” Ashera cat, a genetic blend of African and Asian wildcats with the domestic cat, which costs over $125,000 a pop. All of these engineered animals can be ordered online. Whatever happened to the magic of picking out a family pet at the animal shelter? Today, that idyllic episode has become obsolete; we can instead visit an electronic superstore and choose our pet’s precise genome.

As the employment of cloning deviates further and further from strictly utilitarian purposes, the absence of definitive international regulations means that the only limits on cloning are technological capacity and consumer demand. In this environment, even benign pet-owner sentimentality can proceed unchecked to extreme ends, as in the aforementioned cases of the cat and terrier.

What is more, a decision to clone driven by grief inverts the inherent emotional rationale behind it. A pet is cherished, as humans cherish their own family members, with the knowledge that it will die some day. In other words, these emotional relationships are based on an appreciation of the ephemeral. But as soon as pets can be replaced as easily as worn running shoes or golf clubs, this is lost.

Further, what does a pet owner call the clone of their original pet? At the very least, one hopes that owners will not make the same mistake twice and call their poor cloned dog Booger, after the original.

Emily C. Ingram ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Eliot house.