Dear Bernann McKunney,
It's all over the news today that you're paying $150,000 to clone your dead pit bull pet, Booger.
We can all imagine how much you miss Booger. You say he saved you when another dog reportedly bit off your arm. (Nice to hear about a pit bull saving lives amid the general anti-pit hysteria.) And you felt you just wouldn't be able to live without him. So 18 months before he died, you snipped a bit of his ear and sent it to RNL Bio in Korea, so they'd be able to clone him.
Trouble is ... well ... come to think of it, there are lots of troubles in all this.
Just for starters, the new dog won't be Booger. He or she will at best be like an "identical" twin. But my colleague Francis Battista has identical twin sons – and they couldn't be more different in type and character. How come? Scientists don't know for sure ... like how much of our make-up is environmental over genetic, etc. But the fact is, they're just not remotely the same. So you won't be getting Booger back.
Next, cloning dogs has a troubled history, and it doesn't work very well. To produce clones, the "scientists" may have to sacrifice any number (maybe dozens, maybe hundreds) of other dogs. You don't just take a mother dog, drop in an egg, wait a few months, and out comes a perfect puppy. It just doesn't work like that.
So, ironically, your well-meaning attempt to cheat death will only result in the miserable deaths of a lot more dogs.
You're by no means the first person to want their beloved dog or cat back. People often go looking for reincarnations of Fluffy – touring shelters and pet stores for the pooch who was conceived the day Fido died and maybe got a soul transplant. But eventually, most of us are able to move on and just accept that life comes in infinite garbs and that our own lives are enriched by welcoming someone new and different from what we had before.
But, most important of all, please bear in mind that there are millions – literally millions – of pit bulls just like Booger being killed in shelters every year because people are afraid to adopt them. You, of all people, know the truth about these marvelous dogs. Why not adopt one in honor of Booger? You'll be saving a life, rather than just adding to the numbers being killed in laboratories.
There's still time to change your mind. Think about it.
P.S. You've agreed to pay about $150,000 to the cloning company. It'll only cost you about $50–100 to adopt a pit from a shelter or rescue group. You could donate the rest to places that are caring for abused and abandoned pit bulls. What a gift to Booger and his kind.
And some more about this cloning experiment:
* The news today.
* Fact and fiction, from the U.S. government, about cloning.
* Another site with official info on cloning.
* Resource material on cloning from animalconcerns.org