Letters to the Editor
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Cloning pets
Dear Salon:
Any person considering spending thousands of dollars to clone a deceased pet should first be forced to spend a day in the euthanasia room of their local animal shelter. As your article rightly pointed out, millions of loving cats and dogs -- animals who want to live -- are killed each year in shelters due to lack of homes. Moreover, smaller animal shelters and rescue operations routinely have animals euthanized due to lack of funds for medical care. Given this tragic situation, it is obscene and utterly indefensible for anyone to clone their deceased pet.
I will go further and say that it is obscene and indefensible to allow commercial pet breeders to breed cats and dogs. Puppy mills and cat mills should be made illegal. The sale of live animals in pet stores should be made illegal. Anyone who wants a pet can adopt one at a shelter. Those people who insist on purchasing an animal, when millions of animals die yearly in shelters, are too greedy and self-centered to have pets in the first place.
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Cloning Fido
For most of the history of the human dog partnership, selective breeding was a means to improve the utility of dogs in the human economy, and give rise to specialized shepherds, hunters and draft animals, amongst others. Vanity breeding - the creation of extremely uniform, highly modified shapes and sizes simply for the way they look is much more recent, and frankly a sad commentary on humanity. As the article points out, it not good for the dogs, and I certainly see no way in which manipulating dog breeds so extremely, simply because some person or other wants to own a particular look of dog, is good for people.
Cloning is in this same vein - another, expensive, vanity expense, akin to "needing" a $100,000 luxury BMW when a $20,000 Toyota has equally good or better engineering, economy and practical value, or a 4000 sq ft McMansion for a family of three, when you could all live more comfortably and sanely in one quarter the space.
Get a life, folks. Eschew cloning. If you want a dog for companionship (which I highly recommend for many people), find a dog with a breed background - purebred or mutt - that indicates gentleness, responsiveness, and obediance, and bring it into your life. If you've lost such a dog, get another from a good breeder or the pound - it'll be different, but just as gratifying, despite being idiosyncratically different from your last. The value in the dog-human relationship is what you bring to each other, not how well they match your rarified wants.
Then, having done this, use your leftover cash to do some good for someone or something else in the world.
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My unique mutt
I can relate in one sense to those who want a copy of their special pet. In my case, it is not a purebred that I would want to duplicate but rather my very special mutt of indeterminate origin. We adopted her from the pound as an adult dog, and all we know for sure is that her mother was a pit bull. Her father might have been some kind of hound, to give her longer legs and muzzle. Whatever the mix, she is a terrifical animal - her coat is perfect for our climate and lifestyle, she is just the right "medium" size, she has a great temperment and has a beautiful conformation. There is no way we could seek out another close to her in these characteristics, because we do not know her mixed-breed makeup. If I was so well off that I could afford cloning, I could see the attraction to wanting to remake this pet that has our ideal physical traits.
BUT - I know we could make a thousand clones and never again get our Tara's gentle spirit, extreme devotion and comic abilities. We have no way of duplicating the myriad conditions that made her the great dog she is now. She is as unique in personality as my son, and just as I know I could never replace him with a clone, I can also never replace her. So we will keep her as healthy as possible, enjoy every minute we have with her and then go out and find another diamond in the rough that needs a loving home.
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what's the matter with americans??
children are dying because they don't have clean water - what's wrong with our priorities?
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Selective Breeding is not Cloning
Kirsten Weir makes an interesting point that maybe cloning pets shouldn't be such a big deal since we've been modifying animal breeds for millenia.
However - there's a HUGE difference between selective breeding and genetic engineering through direct modification of DNA. Selective breeding works within the constraints of evolutionary change (granted, it's accelerated).
Cloning and genetic engineering work outside of the constraints of normal reproductive evolution -- constraints which are a natural check. Without those constraints, we're opening up a pandora's box of issues which must be carefully weighed.
And really - all the genetics aside - we should be adopting our animals from the pounds and shelters!
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Pets are not the objective of cloning
One of the reasons animal activists object to cloning is because it can be used to custom-taylor animals- not for rich pet owners, but for animal experimentation. Mice that now have human genes only furthers a huge industry that is oftentimes more interested in liability protection (e.g. pharmaceutical companies) or in trying to produce raw data in the "publish or perish" world of scientific investigation, rather than in actually doing some good in the world. Enough animals suffer at our hands as it is, to create more specifically designed for this purpose strikes many as only furthering inhumane ends.
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Snap Back to Reality
Only in an extremely wealthy and misguided society would the cloning of pets for obscene sums of money be contemplated. This article brought back to memory an article featured in the 12/23/04 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, entitled "Cat has 10 lives, thanks to $50,000 cloning." It related the story of a Texas woman who paid a firm to clone her deceased cat. A quote from David Magnus, associate professor of pediatrics and director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University's school of medicine caught my attention. He said "I can completely sympathize with people who become so attached to their pet that they want to bring it back at any cost, but there is nothing that can bring that animal back. Attempting to do so is unhealthy. It's trying to pretend that death doesn't exist, which speaks to a larger symptom in our culture of not dealing with death." I couldn't agree more.
Others have made good points on this subject. I have long been an advocate for obtaining pets from shelters as opposed to breeders. As a society, however, we need to step back and think about the big picture. The U.N. came out with a report this year detailing how half of the world's children are effectively "denied a childhood" because of war, poverty, malnutrition, etc. The global environment is undeniably in a state of decline. Owning pets can be a rewarding experience. But to go to such extremes to procure one? Where are our priorities?