Don’t Clone Your Pet.
In week 2 of our project on Romeo and Juliet, we’ve once again created a second co-hosted podcast episode. This episode was about adaptations, which is basically any form of media transformed into another. Or honestly, it doesn’t even have to be a form of media, it could be pretty much anything. My group in fact got into a discussion about animal adaptations and cloning, and what it can lead to, which is exactly what I am here to talk about.
Pet cloning has struck popularity all the way in South Korea.
There is a lab team called “The Sooam Biotech Research Foundation”, who specialize in cloning dogs by injecting cloned embryos into the uterus of an anesthetized dog.
They typically cloned these animals for pet owners, but sometimes they are used for police agencies. At the time this article that I found was published (2015), this lab charged 100, 000$ for this process and was the only lab in the entire world to provide this cloning procedure on dogs (since there had been other procedures done on cattle, rabbits, mules and cats). But, I’m sure that after 6 years, there’s now way more labs that are also doing it, and for way less money.
Cloning a dog sounds pretty cool right? Personally, my family and I just lost our family dog, Pender, and the thought of reincarnating him sounded quite appealing. However, I found these articles that stated how terrible of an idea it is to clone a dog, or any animal for that matter.
Aside from the process itself being extremely questionable, it also takes a lot of dogs just to clone one dog. Although the success rate is much higher now, the first successful dog cloning (Snuppy), had more than 1,000 embryos implanted into 123 surrogates, with only 3 pregnancies resulting from that, and only two surviving through birth.
“You can clone the look of a dog, but you can’t clone the soul” – Barbra Streisand
Barbra Streisand, the American singer had cloned her dog that unfortunately passed away. But she came to later find out that the two clones she created had completely different personalities from her original dog. Sure, they looked the same, and their genetics were the same, but that was pretty much it.
It’s these very facts why cloning your family pet or any other animals has still not quite taken off. While it is popular, it is not mainstream; there’s a very extremely low chance that you know someone in your life who’s actually cloned their pet before. It is expensive, is a long process, and frankly, not really worth it.
Additionally, governments are actually guarding against where these sorts of technologies might go or adapt to. For example, in Canada, under the 2004 Assisted Human Reproduction Act, “the creation of a human clone by using any technique and the transplant of a human clone into a human being or into any non-human life form or artificial device is criminally prohibited.”
Anyways, that’s all for now.
Bye!
Works Cited:
Stein, Rob. “Disgraced Scientist Clones Dogs, And Critics Question His Intent”. NPR. September 2015. Why Is A South Korean Doctor Cloning Dogs? : Shots – Health …www.npr.org › sections › health-shots › 2015/09/30 › dis… Accessed Jan 19 2021.
Brogan, Jacob. “The Real Reasons You Shouldn’t Clone Your Dog”. Smithsonian Magazine. March 1018. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-cloning-your-dog-so-wrong-180968550/ Accessed Jan 19 2021.
Gibbens, Sarah. “We Can Clone Pet Dogs-But Is That a Good Idea?” National Geographic. February 2018. Barbra Streisand’s Cloned Dogs Explainedwww.nationalgeographic.com › news › 2018/02 › barb… Accessed Jan 19 2021.
Isasi, Rosario and Shukairy, Maya. “6.3 Cloning”. Royal College Of Physicians And Surgeons Of Canada. July 29 2015. https://www.royalcollege.ca/rcsite/bioethics/cases/section-6/cloning-e Accessed Jan 19 2021.