Why I gave my dog a clone!
Rebecca loved her dachshund Winnie so much, she gave its DNA to scientists to create Britain’s first doggy double. Touching devotion or meddling with nature?
‘Winnie is my rock. I want her to live for ever’ Simon Cowell says he’d like to copy his Yorkies
AT FIRST sight, the two dogs waddling down the streets of West London look like any other miniature Dachshunds. While one i s sleeker and shinier, a bit keener on the lead, the other shows the tell-tale signs of age: an endearingly droopy belly and greying nose.
Mother and daughter, you might think, for you would never guess the truth. One-year-old Mini-Winnie is the carbon copy of 14-year-old Winnie. Literally.
Meet Britain’s first — and, as yet, only — cloned dogs. Scientists in a South Korean lab took a skin sample from the older hound to help create a genetically identical embryo. And the result was Mini-Winnie.
Cloning is — and has been for decades — highly controversial, with experts warning it can produce horrible abnormalities when tried on animals. Not to mention the ethical issues raised by the fact that what can now be so easily done with a dog must be getting increasingly easy to do with humans. While cloning of human babies for reproduction is illegal in the UK, there is no legislation prohibiting animal cloning.
Last week, the European Parliament voted for a ban onthe cloning of farm animals, but there was no mention of pets.
So, while there is nothing to stop people bringing cloned pets into Britain, a clinic is yet to set up here offering the service.
Contrary to the nightmarish visions the word ‘clone’ evokes, Winnie and her genetic replica look the model of two healthy dogs as they both snuggle up on their cheerfully dog-mad owner’s lap.
Rebecca Smith, from Battersea, won a competition to have her beloved Winnie copied for free (the process usually costs £60,000) in return for appearing on a TV documentary charting the process.
After the initial blaze of publicity that greeted the puppy’s return to Britain last August, the killer question has to be: ‘How alike have they turned out to be?’
After all, that was the reason for the costly procedure. ‘Winnie is my rock,’ says Rebecca, ‘I want her to live for ever.’
Unf az e d by the moral maze surrounding her pets, the 31-year- old caterer insists they are very similar — physically at least.
They not only have exactly the same markings, like the little white commas for eyebrows, Rebecca flips over the sleeping hounds to show me they also have the same nipple missing on their underside and an identical kink in their tails.
When I say they look like a portly mother and her daughter, she retorts: ‘That’s a bit like saying that you don’t look the same as you did when you were three.
‘Winnie has just turned into a bit of the pudding over the years, and her tan colour has faded. Actually Mini-Winnie looks exactly like her when she was this age.’
There are personality traits in common, too, Rebecca tells me — although it is perhaps for a seasoned sausage dog owner to decide how unusual these are.
‘They both get car sick. If I leave my handbag on the table, both find clever ways to get up and pull it off.
‘They also hide any treats they find in the same places, like down the sofa cushion or behind the curtain.’
Yet differences in their early lives has had an effect on their characters. It has led Rebecca to agree with geneticists’ estimates that we are all about 80 per cent nature and 20 per cent nurture.
While Winnie spent her early days as a puppy being carried around in Rebecca’s handbag, her little twin had to be reared in the lab for the first few months until she could come into the UK due to quarantine laws.
Since arriving home to a flurry of newspaper headlines, Rebecca says Mini-Winnie has seamlessly fitted into Big Winnie’s life of tummy rubs, cuddles and pig ears, a favourite treat.
From the start, Winnie immediately hit it off with her protege.
‘As soon as I put them together, there was no growling. They sniffed each other’s bottoms, waggled their tails and became good friends, except when Mini-Winnie tried to eat Winnie’s chews.’
Of course, lurking behind this happy domestic scene is the spectre of Dolly the Sheep, created by scientists at Edinburgh University in 1996, who was plagued by health problems and put down at age of six.
‘They have so much more experi- ence now to produce healthy animals,’ says Rebecca. ‘So I wasn’t worried.’
For Winnie’s cloning, a small piece of skin was flown to Seoul. A cell was then inserted into an egg that had had its own DNA removed and a jolt of electricity was used to kick-start the formation of the embryo.
It was then i mplanted i nto a surrogate mongrel dog and Rebecca watched as Mini-Winnie was born by C- section 60 days l ater f rom a mongrel. The only pup in the litter, she weighed 1 lb.
Given the scare stories, wasn’t Rebecca worried about Mini-Winnie arriving with horrible deformities?
No, she says, claiming that the clinic is now among the most efficient in the world, with a rising success rate of cloned puppies turning into healthy dogs.
There are a handful of such labs globally — including in the U.S., China and France. The main purpose is to clone farm animals in an attempt to improve breeds.
Sooam Biotech, the Korean lab, is the most prolific cloner of pets, having created 600 dogs in total — with 60 per cent of their customers coming from the U. S. They created the world’s first cloned dog, an Afghan hound named Snuppy, in 2005, which is still alive.
They say the successful pregnancy rate for implantation is around 35 per cent. So on average one in three dogs will fall pregnant successfully.
Spokesman David Kim said: ‘As far as we know there are no particular laws about cloned dogs both domestically and internationally. Regarding the transportation of animals to the countries of the owners, we must follow the quarantine procedures only, which is different from country to country.’
It’s an issue the RSPCA calls ‘ a serious concern’, because the process causes ‘pain, suffering and distress to animals’. It adds: ‘ We believe that animals are often being cloned with little consideration for ethics or animal welfare’.
There are still many embryos which don’t survive the i mplantation process, so experts fear animals are suffering by being made to be surrogates needlessly.
Rebecca says: ‘I have seen on pet forums that some people are against it. But the facility where the cloning takes place makes sure all the dogs are well treated and the surrogates are only used once. It’s a lovely environment, like something you’d find on Harley Street.
‘I understand some people saying the scientists are playing God but aren’t they also playing God with I VF treatments or body- part transplants?’
So far Mini-Winnie has had a clean bill of health at every vet check-up and Rebecca plans to breed her next year, so there could be lots of MiniWinnies, although she is not sure if the offspring of cloned dogs will keep their pedigree status.
Meanwhile, it seems as if the idea of cloning is catching on.
Impresario Simon Cowell, f or whom £60,000 is small change, has spoken publicly about his desire to c l one hi s Yorkshire Terri er s , Squiddly and Diddly.
But he will be among the first. So far UK owners have been slow to take up the process — Mini-Winnie
stands alone. Not so in America, where there is a lucrative market among bereaved pet owners.
Indeed the Korean lab says 40 per cent of their cloned dogs come from the cells of deceased animals.
Dogs can be cloned a few days after death as long as you wrap the body in towels and put it in the fridge to get good skin samples to send off to the clinic. One man i n New Mexico was reportedly so distraught at the loss of his pet he dug him up from his garden two months later and still managed to get enough DNA to clone the animal.
Bearing i n mind the original Winnie is still with us, though, has it all been worth it? Wouldn’t it have been easier for Rebecca to have found a descendant from the litter Winnie had seven years ago before she was neutered?
Not as far as Rebecca is concerned: ‘I just love the fact that Mini-Winnie has literally grown from a piece of Big Winnie. It makes me love Mini-Winnie even more knowing she is identical.’
The bond between Rebecca and Big Winnie is undeniably close.
‘Winnie was a surprise from my parents for my 18th birthday,’ says Rebecca. ‘ She came everywhere with me. When I went to Newcastle University to study sociology, I smuggled her i nto my halls of residence in my bag and she lived with me in secret.
‘I would take her to lectures, too, as she would sleep right through.’
Rebecca says her dog was also her ‘rock’ through some difficult times.
‘ In my l ate teens, I suffered anorexia and bulimia, which took a complete grip on my life,’ she says. ‘I’d spend £60 on food, eat the whole lot and throw it back up again. I became so weak I ended up in hospital on a drip.
‘I spent a lot of time on my own in my bedroom, fighting it. Winnie was my companion, my calming influence. She’d stare at me with her wise eyes as if to say: “What are you doing to yourself?” I knew I had to get better for her. All my life, she has been my security blanket.’
When Rebecca met her husband Alex Bourne, 31, an Army officer back from a tour of Afghanistan and who now runs an import business, he had to love Winnie too for their relationship to work.
‘We met through mutual friends three years ago and he won my heart through Winnie. I was never going to be with a guy who did not adore her as much as I did. When we got engaged, we talked about how she was getting older and Alex joked that we’d have to get her cloned because I’d be so lost without her but we never thought it was possible.’
It was Alex who came across the cloning competition in a newspaper: ‘I entered the same day and got picked from three finalists. When I was told I had won, it was like being told I was pregnant myself.’
When Alex and Rebecca married near her father’s Saffron Walden home in Essex last May, both dogs were in attendance. Two of their five bridesmaids carried the Mini and Big Winnie down the aisle. Each wore glittery crowns and were immortalised in icing on top of the cake.
Now six months pregnant, with a baby due in November, Rebecca hopes that the devotion she has shown her pets will help prepare her for motherhood.
Since t he cl oning, s he has received nearly a dozen emails from dog-lovers all over the world asking if they should do the same.
‘One man sent me an email saying: “My mother’s dog has died and she can’t get over it. We’re thinking of having i t cloned but can you promise it will be identical as we will have to get a big loan out from the bank?”
‘I told him that probably they will l ook the same, but I couldn’t promise, but you will still love them the same. I love Big Winnie and Mini-Winnie j ust as much, but differently.’
While she has her critics, Rebecca believes t hat as t he cost of commercial cloning starts to fall, more British dog-lovers will give it a try.
Yet she is also aware that many will not understand why some animal-lovers go to such extreme lengths.
‘There will be plenty who will say: “It’s only a dog. Get over it.”
‘But if a child died they would not have that attitude. They’d let you grieve.’
Back in South Korea, Winnie’s cells are being kept on ice, meaning it’s possible Rebecca could clone her again and again for years to come.
Yet Rebecca admits that having a replica of Winnie will not take the edge off her grief when her pet dies.
‘I imagine it’s the same as if you have a child that passes away. Just because you have another one waiting in the wings won’t stop you f eeling sad when you lose the first-born.
‘ Winnie may be cloned, but I have come to realises he is irreplaceable.’
As science gets closer every day to creating the first cloned human, that sounds like an important lesson for us all.