Devoted or just barking? The couple who spent £70,000 to clone their dead dog
RICHARD REMDE and Laura Jacques look shattered. Dogtired you might say. It’s less than a week since the elated couple from West Yorkshire welcomed their new arrivals into the world. However, the bleary appearance of these new parents has nothing to do with three-hourly feeds or regular nappy changes. Just a few hours ago they touched down after a 20-hour flight from Seoul in South Korea. There, in a futuristic lab, they witnessed history being made: the birth of two new boxer dog puppies, which had been cloned from their beloved pet dog, Dylan.
It was a world first. Why? Well, the procedure has been conducted many times since an Afghan hound named Snuppy was cloned in 2005, and has always involved cells being taken from a living animal.
But in this new — and some might argue disturbing — case, cells were taken from Dylan when he had been dead for almost a fortnight. The incredible story will raise many ethical and moral questions. But today, at their four-bedroom home in Silsden, the couple are defiant.
‘Yes, we’ve been selfish,’ admits Laura, 29. ‘It’s only benefited us. But there’s no question we’ll love those dogs. And seeing his face every day will be a reminder of how much I loved Dylan.’
To say the couple are dog-mad is an understatement. They already own a golden retriever, a bull mastiff, a shih tzu and a cocker spaniel (not to mention seven guinea pigs, two rabbits, one gerbil and a hamster). They chose their home on a hill overlooking spectacular countryside specifically to suit their pets.
‘There’s a little woodland area,’ says Richard, 43, who is managing director of his own building company. ‘It’s great for the dogs. They’ve got loads of space. We’re going to build a graveyard for Dylan in the corner with a headstone.’
Indeed, Dylan’s corpse is still in a freezer in one of the house’s outbuildings, patiently awaiting a burial that befits him. It was their mutual love of animals that led to Laura — who runs a part-time dog-walking business — and Richard becoming a couple six years ago.
‘We met on a dog walk,’ says Laura. ‘I’d always loved animals, but Dylan was my first dog. I was 20 when I got him as a 12-week-old puppy. He was my whole world. We were best friends. He even slept on my bed. If anything, I loved him too much.’
In May last year, tragedy struck when eight-year-old Dylan suffered a seizure. Subsequent tests showed he had an inoperable brain tumour.
As Laura emotionally describes Dylan’s last days, it’s clear how deep her feelings were for him.
‘The last time I saw him was at the vet’s. I pretended to be cheery so he wouldn’t be scared,’ she sobs. ‘The next day, the vet rang. Dylan was dying. He was having cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but they were about to stop. I screamed and screamed. I begged them to keep going. I fell to the floor, I couldn’t feel my limbs.
‘By the time I got to the vet’s, Dylan was gone. He looked like he was sleeping. I was inconsolable. I lay on the floor and cuddled him until Richard arrived.
‘I blame myself. He’d probably woken up, wondered where his mum was and when I didn’t come, became anxious. His heart stopped. If I’d seen him that morning, maybe he wouldn’t have died.
‘I wasn’t ready to lose him. I couldn’t believe my baby had gone. My baby who I loved so much. I don’t have any children so he was my world.’
Richard, who has two daughters aged seven and 11 from a previous marriage, says that although he too was distraught by Dylan’s death, he was horrified to see Laura so utterly destroyed by grief. ‘I loved Dylan, too,’ he says. ‘But you can’t put into words the bond that Laura and Dylan had. She stopped eating and drinking. She was in complete shock. I didn’t know how to help her.’
The vet allowed the couple to bring Dylan’s body home before burial.
‘I know Richard found it hard to see Dylan’s body, but it meant I could pretend he was still alive,’ Laura says. ‘I put him in his dog bed in our bedroom. I remember waking up, looking across and hoping that it was all a dream.’
Of course, denial is a natural stage of grief. But six months on, Laura says she still can’t come to terms with Dylan’s death. She admits her powerful grief may stem from personal tragedies she has suffered, including the sudden death of a close friend when she was younger.
She asks to keep the details private, but admits to having undergone counselling.
‘My way of coping is to pretend nothing’s happened. I am totally in denial. I suspect I may still have some kind of breakdown over Dylan. I know I’ve cheated somehow, delaying my grief by cloning him. But I simply can’t understand how someone you love can just be gone.’
A day after bringing Dylan’s body home, Richard first suggested cloning Dylan, remembering a television documentary they’d both seen which showed a British woman cloning her dachshund. The dog (who was still alive) was taken to the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in Seoul for a complicated medical procedure.
DNA was extracted from the dog’s cells and implanted into a ‘blank’ dog’s egg which had its nucleus removed. Electric shocks were then administered to the egg to trigger cell division, before being implanted inside a surrogate dog.
The procedure costs £60,000 and doesn’t come without risks, as Laura readily admits.
‘I would never have done it when Dylan was alive, as he would have needed to go under an anaesthetic. I’d never have risked his health,’ she says.
‘And when Richard suggested cloning, I instantly said it was too much money. Besides, I thought you could only clone living animals. But, after doing some research, I was elated to find that you could clone within five days of death. I couldn’t believe it.’
Richard smiles. ‘For me, it was just about keeping hope alive for Laura. We didn’t first plan on immediately using the cells to clone the dogs. We were simply going to keep them frozen so she knew she had the chance to clone them in the future.’
However, it soon became clear that if they were to clone Dylan at all, they faced a race against time. And the process was far from simple.
The couple contacted the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation directly and were told they needed to get Dylan’s cells to them as soon as possible after taking them.
‘Every vet we approached to collect Dylan’s cells turned us down, worried about losing their licence, so we went to Boots and bought every bit of medical kit we could find and improvised,’ says Laura.
‘I had to shave Dylan’s tummy and take skin biopsies. Richard couldn’t
‘I wasn’t ready to lose Dylan — he was my world’
‘You can clone animals up to five days after death’
‘It was weird.
We had to defrost our dog’
watch. I am normally squeamish, but there was no alternative.’
Using a biopsy kit they bought on Amazon, Laura took one skin sample from Dylan’s tummy four days after his death.
The lab told them they had to keep them as cold as possible, so they put the samples in test tubes, wrapped them in ice packs and then packaged them inside polystyrene boxes they had already bought in preparation.
Once Laura had collected the samples, Richard caught a flight at 4am the next day for an 11,000-mile round trip to South Korea with the samples in his luggage in the hold of the plane. The tickets alone cost them £600.
By this point, even they began to question what they were doing. ‘We didn’t dare tell anyone because we were so embarrassed,’ says Richard. ‘I jumped on a flight with the samples in my bag. I had no idea what to expect. I’d only ever been to Spain before.’
When Richard landed, he was stopped by airport security, who thought he was smuggling drugs. ‘My heart pounded,’ he says. ‘When they let me go, I came out of the airport, a van from the laboratory pulled up, I gave them the samples and they raced off.
‘I didn’t even leave the airport before flying home.’
So far, so extraordinary. But the battle to recreate Dylan was about to take another turn. The clinic first said that the samples Laura had collected were suitable for cloning. They gave permission for Dylan to be put into deep freeze so he could be stored before his eventual burial. Then, three days later, in a heartbreaking twist, further tests revealed that the cells were, in fact, useless.
Laura was going to have to harvest cells from Dylan’s body yet again. His corpse was brought out of the freezer to defrost and Richard found himself on yet another £600 flight to drop off the samples.
‘By this point even I thought it was getting weird,’ says Richard. ‘We had hired a refrigerated van and were defrosting a dead dog.
‘But I’d seen a change in Laura. She wasn’t back to normal but she was better. I wanted to help her.’
While this batch of samples was good quality, scientists advised that they might not survive a further bout of freezing and defrosting. The message was clear: Laura and Richard had to use them or lose them. The couple decided to go for it. But there was only one problem — the cost.
‘The final price tag was £67,000,’ admits Laura. ‘We don’t have that kind of money just lying around. We’d saved up over £100,000 to pay down our mortgage on this house so we decided to use it to clone Dylan and took out a bigger mortgage instead.
‘People have since said that we should have given the money to a dog’s home or animal sanctuary. But I do loads of fundraising for animal charities.’
On October 20, five months after Dylan’s death, the clinic began the cloning process. It wasn’t until mid-November that the couple received good news.
‘I had prepared myself for the worst,’ says Laura. ‘But when I heard it had been a success, the hairs on my arms stood on end. I was overjoyed.’
But when the clinic then reported that the cells had produced not one but two pregnancies, Richard confesses he wasn’t initially thrilled.
‘I thought: “Oh God, is it going to be twice the price?” Thankfully, though, that wasn’t the case.’
The couple flew to South Korea just before Christmas, spending £1,200 on flights, to witness the birth of puppy Chance, born on Boxing Day by C-section to a surrogate dog.
Despite his initial fears, Richard admits that it was a magical moment. ‘As soon as the puppy came out, I was able to see it in the incubator. It was so emotional,’ he says.
‘I was at the birth of both my children and it was exactly like that. Laura was weeping and even I had a tear.’
Laura admits she was in a daze: ‘I didn’t know what to expect. When the baby — sorry, I mean puppy — started making noises, that’s when I knew it was real.
‘I had to hold Richard’s arm to steady myself. All his colourings and patterns on his fur are just like Dylan’s were.’
The puppy was the 746th dog to be cloned by the clinic and shares 100 per cent of Dylan’s DNA. His ‘brother’ Shadow — number 747 — followed afterwards to another surrogate, but much later in the night and the couple unfortunately missed the moment.
It’s one thing to copy a pet’s physical attributes, but cloning a personality is impossible. However, Laura says it was never her intention to create a complete doggy double.
‘My Dylan is my Dylan and he was special because of all the memories we shared,’ says Laura. ‘I know we’re never going to have that with these dogs. They will have their own personalities.’
The puppies will have to stay in quarantine in South Korea until July but Richard and Laura plan to visit them four times over the coming months, which will cost them another £5,000 in flights.
Incredibly, they’ve also decided to offer a home to the two surrogate mothers, too. ‘I was going to convert our garage into an office but it looks like it’s now going to be an area for the dogs,’ Richard says.
But will there ever be the pitter patter of human babies’ feet? Richard admits that while he would love another baby, ‘Laura is not too bothered because she’s all about the dogs. And I’m not getting any younger.’
There are no regulations on the cloning of pets, although the European parliament recently voted to outlaw the cloning of farm animals.
Critics argue that cloning raises serious ethical and welfare concerns. A spokesman for the RSPCA said: ‘Cloning animals requires procedures that cause pain and distress, with extremely high failure and mortality rates.
‘There is also evidence that cloned animals frequently suffer physical ailments such as tumours, pneumonia and abnormal growth patterns.’
But Laura is confident that the surrogate mothers were well cared for and the new pups will be healthy. ‘When people say we’re messing with nature, I agree that it’s not the natural order. But good things can come out of it, like being able to clone organs.
‘However, I’m not sure that we’d ever do it again. While Chance and Shadow won’t know they are clones, to me, it will be like having a little piece of Dylan by my side once again.’