Its fragility is what makes life so precious

IKNEW that it was time to say goodbye when Frank Sinatra came on the radio. At 18 years old, my little cat Dookie had been a constant companion since my earliest days at university. She had seen off flatmates and boyfriends, endured house parties and house moves and had always been there at the end of the day with a cuddle or a claw, dependent on mood.

When you tell people your beloved pet lived to the age of 18, they will likely reply that they had a good innings. It’s true of course but it doesn’t make the end any easier.

Early that morning, Dookie had lost the power of her legs. I laid out a blanket for her in the hall and lay down next to her. She rested her chin on my head, unable to do much more, and we lay there for a while, listening to the cars outside on the street.

It was a Friday, and in the kitchen, Desert Island Discs was starting on Radio 4. The guest had selected Sinatra’s My Way, and as it belted out of the kitchen and into the hall my beautiful little cat lifted her paw, and with great effort, laid it on my hand.

When the song was over I got up and called the vet. She died in my arms an hour later. It took a lot longer for me to stop weeping.

You might imagine then, that I would have some sympathy for Laura Jacques and Richard Remde from West Yorkshire, who this week welcomed two new puppies, Chance, pictured above, and Shadow, who were cloned from their former dog, Dylan.

The pups, which were born in a clinic in South Korea, are Britain’s first cloned dogs.

Dylan died of a brain tumour last June and his DNA was extracted 12 days later and flown to South Korea for cloning.

The puppies have the exact same genetic makeup as Dylan and are both said to be doing well. The couple shelled out £67,000 for the procedure. It is their money of course, and they are fully entitled to do what they like with it.

But while I understand as well as any pet owner how difficult it is to lose one (as Rudyard Kipling wrote in his heartbreaking poem The Power of the Dog: ‘You will discover how much you care, and will give your heart to a dog to tear’), there seems to me something fundamentally wrong about paying such an enormous amount of money to do something so entirely unnatural.

Apart from anything else, £67,000 could have rehomed a lot of dogs, or given an animal charity a welcome new year boost.

The money, though, isn’t really the issue. It’s the sheer human petulance of it. The entitlement of thinking that just as you can replace a crashed car or a broken iPhone with exactly the same model, you can also replace your pet with Dog 2.0.

And what happens when, as it inevitably will, the time comes when Chance and Shadow must also shuffle off the canine coil? Will their DNA be extracted, flown to Seoul and more cloned puppies produced? Where does it end?

Painful as it is, sometimes we need to learn to live with a good innings.