Cloning your dogs is barking, Barbra
Have you seen those pictures of Barbra Streisand and her two cloned puppies? And did you start to hum: “She’s got nothing to be guilty of/ Her love/ Will climb any mountain…?”
Or did you stare aghast and wonder just how rich, spoiled and bored you have to be to clone a dog? Twice. And not just any one-in-million dog, but a pedigree Coton de Tulear, a niche variety so finely bred that they all look pretty much identical.
Even Barbra, 75, was stumped when the pair were born – so much so, she had to give them different-coloured collars so she could tell Miss Scarlett and Miss Violet apart. Then she got a third, Miss Fanny, who wasn’t an identidog and – guess what? – she loves her just as much.
Apparently, the real motivation behind the $100,000 decision to clone her original dog, 14-year-old Samantha, wasn’t merely superficial. Oh no. The double-oscar and 10 Grammy awardwinner wanted to replicate her pet’s “brown eyes and seriousness”.
Wow. Where to start? More saliently, where will this end? I think we all know the answer to that one, but we ought to drill down a little deeper and examine the core issue here.
Giving the dog a clone isn’t about loving a dear companion, it’s about a refusal to accept death, which is, in its way, an abnegation of life.
Death is life’s only certainty. Remove that immutable end point and you remove the uniqueness, the specialness, even the sanctity of life.
A lot has happened since Dolly the sheep was born in Edinburgh back in 1996. Researchers worldwide have cloned 23 mammal species, including cattle, cats, deer, dogs, horses, mules, oxen, rabbits and rats. Britain’s first cloned dog is even expecting a litter of dachshund puppies – four years after being conceived in a test tube.
Back in 2014, Rebecca Bourne, 34, from Cambridgeshire, put forward her elderly dachshund, Winnie, to be cloned in a £60,000 competition by Sooam Biotech, a South Korean tech firm. She won, and the cloned puppy, called Minnie Winnie, was born in Seoul the following year. Now, Minnie Winnie is expecting offspring, which were conceived naturally.
Does that matter? Well, yes and no. Yes, because it shows how far the science has come; and no, because dogs have puppies all the time so cloning them is, at best, a rich person’s hobby and, at worst, a waste of time and resources.
Is it worth cloning our rare native breeds like the otterhound and Glen of Imaal terriers? I’m even in two minds about that. It’s sad to witness their decline but, frankly, there’s no point if people don’t want them. The Kennel Club’s best bet is to give a couple to Meghan Markel and see their popularity soar.
On a rather more alarming note, in January of this year, it was reported that monkeys Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua had been cloned in Shanghai, the first primates to have been created using cells from the foetal tissue of another individual.
Now that is getting uncomfortably close to homo sapiens. But one useful conclusion from the experiment is that cloning is more successful using young cells rather than adult ones.
So quite aside from the dubious ethics, if the technique were to be used on humans, mad boffins would have to clone babies, purely based on a hunch that they’re more likely to turn out to be Olympic champions or geniuses.
Right now, science is making progress in this field because it can; no reasonable person this side of Aldous Huxley seriously advocates making human beings. But as reproductive techniques improve and innovation begets breakthrough, the day will come when we – as a species – will have to reach a consensus about what is acceptable and what is not.
Just this week, the Government published guidelines stating that children born to surrogates should be told of their background for the sake of “openness, confidence and transparency”. It even went so far as to suggest hard-pressed hospitals provide post-natal accommodation for the intended parents, as well as the surrogate, to promote “dignity and respect”.
While I should have thought that decent parents would not hesitate to explain surrogacy to their child, I do rather cavil at the interference of the state in such intensely private matters.
I’m not sure where soap operas and daytime television would be without the paternity disputes and deceits that are recognisable as part and parcel of human and, indeed, animal life.
According to a DNA study carried out in 2016, one in every 50 fathers is unwittingly raising another man’s biological child. Researchers expected it to be almost 10per cent. So does the Government have a right to demand transparency in these cases, too? No, it does not. If no laws are broken, it has no business meddling in our private affairs.
Similarly, news that the Court of Appeal has given the parents of a sperm donor the right to see their grandchild strikes me as setting an unwelcome (did I say unwelcome? I mean bonkers…) precedent.
A man agreed to father a child for a female couple and when his access agreement broke down, he had every right to seek redress in law – but I’m not sure why his parents feel they should be involved. As it is, they have been granted two days a year, which, to me, succeeds only in making a bit of a nonsense out of the whole thing.
Perhaps they ought to just clone the child? Then everyone would be equally happy – or equally confused.
Babies are a divine gift, not a human right. That’s not to say we shouldn’t strive to conceive them if it doesn’t happen naturally (I know I did), but the prospect of cloning children or, indeed, puppies chills me to the marrow.
Meanwhile, over in Malibu, the jury is out on Barbra’s designer dogs. So far, they don’t appear to have the precise qualities she expected (brown eyes, seriousness). That’ll be down to nurture versus nature, then. Either way, that’s quite a burden of expectation on a dog. Imagine the impact on a child. Please can we go back to The Way We Were?