Tuesday Topics #42 - A Cabana Clone?
A couple nights ago, I was so warm and toasty on the couch, snuggled in blankets, with our cat Angie sleeping on my lap and Cabana laying next to me. Not wanting to get up, I mindlessly flipped through the channels on the TV and came across a show on TLC called "I Cloned My Pet". It followed the stories of 3 people who had lost their beloved dogs and were in such mourning that they almost couldn't go on with their lives. For a $50,000 price tag, a company in South Korea could create exact duplicates of their dogs. I sat enraptured through the end of the program, waiting to see if they indeed got identical dogs to the ones they had lost.
The answer was yes! Of course, the delivered dogs were still puppies, so it's hard to know if their temperaments would be exact matches through adulthood. But even down to one white toe on one of the dogs, they physically matched their originals, and each person was extremely pleased with the results. 
Out of curiosity, I decided to look up the Korean cloning company's website, Sooam.com. Those Koreans are a crafty bunch. ;) The information on their site absolutely boggled my mind. It's amazing what they are capable of doing, although in my opinion, supremely controversial. Above is a photo of yellow lab Lancelot, the first commercially cloned dog in the US, produced by Sooam. In the video on their site, it says this Florida couple paid $155,000 for the clone, making the current $50,000 seem like a bargain.
Would I ever clone Cabana? Heck no, I'm much too much of a cheapskate to shell out that kind of money. Plus, Guide Dogs didn't deem Cabana breeder-worthy or even guide dog-worthy, for that matter. Sure, Cabana is a fabulous dog, and I adore her, but I don't know whether the world really needs more Cabanas. She's one-in-a-million, and I think we should just keep it that way. But that does raise an interesting question about working dogs. There were a number of examples of cloned dogs on the Sooam website, many of which were excellent working dogs. I wonder if service dog organizations should change from breeding to cloning--it seems like it would raise their success rate, right?
Would you clone your pet? What if cloning only cost $1,000, rather than $50,000? Would that make a difference in your response? Do you think it would be amazing...or a bit creepy, to have a beloved pet come back to life as a clone?
