No best friend to notion of dog cloning
Expert would have told Streisand: ‘Nooooooo!’ Give a needy dog a home
A recent Variety magazine interview with Barbra Streisand drew attention for one curious revelation: Two of the singer/actress’s Coton de Tulear dogs are clones of the entertainer’s dog Samantha, who died last year at age 14.
Few people outside the canine cloning industry know as much about the subject as John Woestendiek, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and author of the book Dog, Inc.: The Uncanny Inside Story of Cloning Man’s Best Friend:
Q: Why would people want to clone their dogs?
A: They want their dogs back is the simplest answer. And a lot of them believe they are getting their dogs back, as opposed to just a genetically identical twin. They are, often, grieving. They are often wealthy. They are often not used to being told no. They only sometimes realize how incredibly selfish their act is. They don’t realize they could almost always find an identical dog that is up for adoption somewhere, or they think that would only be a second-best choice. They want to keep the memories of the original and see cloning as a way of doing that.
How big a business opportunity did those involved believe dog cloning was, and how have their hopes panned out?
They foresaw saw a huge market, both in banking dog cells and in cloning them for bereaved owners. There are always, due to their popularity and short life spans, many beloved dogs dying — and many families grieving. At one point there were three companies on the case, two of which were in South Korea. An American company — the one connected to the earliest efforts to clone a dog, at Texas A&M University — had formed earlier, but when unable to clone on their own, it teamed up with (a Korean firm). The American company eventually pulled out, saying the standards they had applied to caring for the dogs used in their experiments were not being followed in Korea.
The effort to clone dogs began when John Sperling, the founder of the University of Phoenix, read about Dolly the sheep and decided to clone his girlfriend’s dog. The Texas A&M effort he funded failed, though they managed to clone many other species. South Korea picked up the research after that and pulled it off. The girlfriend’s dog? Missy, deceased by then, was eventually cloned in Korea, and one of the pups was presented to the girlfriend. She pronounced it overly rambunctious and didn’t keep it.
I think anti-cloning campaigns by animal welfare organizations and, I’d hope, exposés like my book may have kept the companies from thriving. The second Korean company pulled out, leaving, to my knowledge, only one lab where dogs are being commercially cloned for pet owners. Viagen, an American company, offers the service, but it’s not clear if they are actually performing cloning or acting as a middle man.
What are some of the ethical questions involved?
The big moral one is do we have the right to do this simply because we can. The animal welfare concerns are many: the number of dogs used in the process, the low success rates (early on), the sometimes freaky ways it can go awry.
If Barbra Streisand had reached out to you for counsel before cloning her dog, what would you have told her?
A resounding “Nooooooo!” I’d say ask yourself who you are doing this for. The original dog? Clearly not. The clone? No way. Yourself? Likely yes.