Okay, so we’ve had Dolly the sheep , and now polo horses.
But what about cats and dogs?
There would be real money to be made…
Everybody loves their puppy and kitty. And there are lots of people who would pay big bucks for a perfect copy of their favorite pet.
Why hasn’t this become a big business?
The pet cloning industry already exists. Many companies do it. For example:
I would guess that it’s not super common since most pets aren’t really that unique. Each pet will be unique, but generally any dog is going to be similar to most other dogs. Someone who loses their pet poodle can get another poodle that’s pretty much the same. Cloning is probably more about satisfying the emotional need of holding onto their past pet rather than really needing a clone of the same dog.
I’d feel as though I was betraying my pet if I cloned him. I can imagine my recently departed cat, Tibby, looking down on me from Kitty Heaven, shaking his head, thinking, how COULD you!
From a personality standpoint, it’s Nature vs. Nurture. Anyone expecting a cloned pet (or child) to act EXACTLY like the original is fooling themselves. Yeah, they may have some of the same tendancies, but “nurture” has a whole hell of a lot to do with their personalities. Now, if you’re looking for exact matches for organ donations,…
Even in fiction folks give up the chance to clone a pet. I never would have thought I’d have tears in my eyes over an episode of Futurama, but Jurassic Bark did it to me.
I remember reading some crappy pulp novel in the 90s where the bad guy was some rich pedophile on an island who would clone famous people secretly to then have sex with them, and since he was a pedophile he didn’t have to wait that long for it!
The good guy vigilante was so disgusted he basically set fire to the entire island and killed everyone clones and all. But the clones WANTED to die, so he was actually doing the right thing.
I’m pretty sure it was from the same book series where the vigilante hero fought evil Mail Carriers who were all part of a secret terrorist cell (since this was the 90s and Mailmen with guns was a hot topic)
There’s an old joke. I heard it a little differently but…
Once there was a mad scientist who worked by himself in his laboratory.
He was so lonely that one day, he decided to clone himself. Everything
worked perfectly, except that the clone had a very foul mouth. The
scientist worked with the clone, but alas, he could not make the clone
clean up his language. He got so tired of the clone’s language that one
day he pushed him off the end of a cliff. A policeman rushed up to him
and yelled “You are under arrest! You are under arrest!”
“What for?” the mad scientist asked.
And the policeman’s answer was: For making an obscene clone fall.
In the film Multiplicity, Michael Keaton is cloned, then behind his back the clone gets himself cloned, and the clone’s clone does it, and each copy-of-a-copy is a little blurrier, like with a Xerox machine, which in cloning terms means by the fourth iteration you have a fairly erratic personality. That’s one potential downside.
The movie was also a serious reflection on the ethics of self-replication. I think one of the first restrictions that had to be strictly adhered to was “No Clone Nookie!”, after one of the copies ended up in bed with the Original’s wife. Yeah, I can see how that could be a problem.
Which raises the legal question of if any child would be the offspring of the original (assume for the sake of this argument that the wife & clone had sex consensually and with full knowledge of the situation). I’m guessing not, since others have said that clones are kinda like identical twins?
No sir, they were clones, just a special type that popped out of the clone machine as perfect Michael Keaton copies, well at least they looked the same. It was Science, not the boring biology kind but science as we like it, where anything cool is posible and nobody bothers worrying about the implications, like who’s going to pay for the Clone Chow?