I didn’t know it had gotten so easy to clone your dog, but apparently it’s becoming quite common.
Companies such as ViaGen now do it all the time, apparently for people who want to “resurrect” a beloved dog — or, less altruistically, champion race horses.
It’s not always successful. A large number of cloned pregnancies result in miscarriages, and some of the animals who do progress as far as live birth do not thrive and eventually die.
But some clonings are successful in terms of the cloned version being healthy. But many owners of cloned pets report that the living copies of the pet they sought to replace are not as much like the original as they had hoped.
I get why someone might want to try to re-create the relationship they had with a pet who died.
But I also can’t get past the nagging feeling that doing so, when there are so many shelter animals in need of good homes, seems less than ideal in today’s world.
And if you aren’t going to get an exact copy in terms of appearance and behavior, the whole enterprise is a bit of a waste of money.
PBS’s NOVA has a newly released short video about the topic below.