Would You Clone Your Pet?
January 25th 2009 21:00
Photo by Sogning. Used in accordance with the terms of Wikimedia Commons’ GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
Has this ever crossed your mind at one time or another? I must say it hasn’t in my case. A lot of it has to do with the fact when I had pets, there was no such thing as cloning. The second thing was even if I did clone my ducks, Brown-o and White-o, the clones would be identical in appearance but I doubt they would be identical in terms of personality. How could they be when they wouldn’t be brought up under identical circumstances and undergone identical life experiences? And it was their personality that made up their very essence. Not only that but how do I know if there aren’t any genetic problems with the clones? One only needs to look at the short life of Dolly the sheep to see that cloning is not without its problems.
Cloning itself is a difficult, tedious process with a low success rate. Again, we only need to look at Dolly. According to Wikipedia, it took 277 eggs to create 29 embryos. Of this 29, three lambs were born and two of them died. The surviving one was, of course, the infamous Dolly.
This leads me to a book I had been reading called Cat Body, Cat Mind by Dr Michael W. Fox. The book covers the ethics of cloning. The author points out that in cloning animals, there is no intrinsic benefit to the animals themselves. It’s not as if animals want to be cloned. Dr Fox also says instead of spending the thousands of dollars it would require to clone a cat or dog, the money could be better spent on improving the welfare of hundreds, if not thousands, of animals around the world.
Wikipedia cloning link
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Comment by Kleonaptra
Kalikapsychosis
Although I have heard of people cloning their pets and being happy with the results, it has been proved that cloning does not create an exact replica of the original animal. In horses, cloned animals have had white markings where the 'parent' animal did not - the most interesting case for me was the attempted cloning of a gelding, the embryo was implanted in a surrogate and the animal was indeed a perfect replica - except he was born with testicles!
The people involved in the cloning considered it a great success, forgetting of course that the original genetic imprint did not include mapping for testicles, the horse merely grew them himself in utero. This proves to me ultimately that nature has her way - no matter what we do she rules.
Its good news for breeding - being able to use a specific genetic map for a longer time, but in terms of personal, no I would not clone just to 'keep them with me' breeding may be a different matter.
Comment by Queenie
Quirky Folk
Quirky Queenie
Comment by Kleonaptra
Kalikapsychosis
They went on to say that in other cloning experiments for horses the 'duplicates' had been born with white markings in different places to the original animals. They tried hard to describe it scientifically, like the white markings were the same ones but due to pigments and 'blah blah science speak' they moved.
White markings dont just 'move'. They are like fingerprints - we use them to identify horses in their papers and ID certificates. If a marking is wrong even by a centimetre, you can be disqualified from competition or breeding with the animal. So their argument didnt fly with me. I just though, so we silly humans thought we could make replicas, and mother nature stuck her finger in the pot anyway and said, "you know what? Id rather it just be new life"
Comment by Queenie
Quirky Folk
Quirky Queenie
I never knew that. Thanks for sharing.