Dogs and Cloning

As anyone who knows me can tell you, all you have to do to get me talking non-stop is to ask me about my dogs. I have been the proud parent or co-parent of four magnificent mutts, and the happiness they bring into my life defies rational description. I have come to conclude that dogs are a part of the human condition, having been members of our extended families for, depending on the source and the method used, up to 135,000 years, with fossil finds showing humans and wolves in close proximity even longer. Even accepting the standard 10,000- 15,000-year time frame most often cited, dogs have clearly been with us for longer than civilization itself.

It is with this perspective that I read an article in the New York Times about cloning dogs in the attempt to retain beloved pets. On the one hand, I can sympathize. My oldest dog, Grendel, is approaching his ninth birthday. As a largish dog, his expected lifespan is generally put at between eight and thirteen years, and since he is healthy I have no reason to expect it to be on the short side. Grendel is a wonderful dog. He is intelligent, happy and (I daresay) handsome, a tolerant older sibling to the other dogs (ages six years and seven months), and a faithful companion. On the other hand, that I must someday lose him is a source of worry and sadness, but it is this fact that also gives our relationship poignancy. It is a reminder that I must cherish each day we share together and that I should never take his presence for granted.

Cloning holds no hope of conferring immortality on Grendel. Those who cleave to such hopes must have an overly deterministic view of life, as though genes were the only (or at least greatest) contributor to the being that is their dog, a view which, naturally, they would not extend to themselves. Even though in the NYT article the entrepreneur gives a nod to nurture, he sells this hope. That's what makes the offer of cloning so insidious; it is an offer of perpetuity that is only shown false after it is far too late for the purchaser and the animal involved.

A dog cloned from Grendel, would be just that, a dog cloned from Grendel. A wiser parent, I would not panic with his digestive woes, sparing him numerous trips to the vet that are certainly the reason for his pathological fear of the place. I might be able to mitigate the effects of a genetic tendency to hip dysplasia through different nutrition. He would grow up the youngest of the pack and not the oldest, perhaps lacking the confidence he has around other dogs. There would be no minute bare patch on his muzzle where a copperhead bit him one terrifying evening when he was four months old. The dimples at his hips, remnants of the bilateral Femoral Head Ostectomies he had eight years ago would not be there; they are a sign, certainly of pain, but also of his triumph over adversity, and ours (I teared up the first morning I saw him walk up stairs after months of bunny-hopping before and after surgery).

He would likely not even be named Grendel. I named him that because I had so recently been enthralled by the language of Seamus Heaney's verse translation of the ancient epic.

All in all, it is hard to see how such a clone would be an any way a continuation of the original, so much has he been shaped by circumstance. This new creature would likely be intelligent, energetic and very, very, black, just like his progenitor. But he wouldn't be Grendel, nor will these clones for which people are paying huge sums be the lost pets they resemble. It is a disservice, to the memory of beloved family members and to the living animals cloned from them, to expect otherwise. Better to go to the pound, find a likely, lively puppy, and adopt an animal truly in need, than to create a new one in the vain hope of capturing that which cannot be captured.