When does “feel-good news story” cross over to “holy crap that’s desperate and creepy?” This story about a commercial pet-cloning agency cloning five puppies from a famous 9/11 rescue dog’s DNA leans just a tad towards the latter…
James Symington, a former Canadian police officer, choked back tears as he formally took possession of the five descendants of his beloved German shepherd named Trakr, who died in April.
Symington was presented with Trakr’s offspring after winning a competition organized by California firm BioArts International — the “Golden Clone Giveaway” — to find the world’s most “cloneworthy” dog.
BioArts International chief executive Lou Hawthorne said canine cloning would remain beyond the reach of ordinary pet lovers, with cloned dogs costing an average 144,000 dollars each.
“I think 99 percent of the time people should get their pets from shelters,” he told AFP. “But can we agree though that one percent of the time if you have a one in a million dog and you have the money to pay for it, you should be able to go to either a breeder or a cloner?”
Why stop with 9/11 hero dogs? Here’s some other happy cloning stories I’m looking forward to:
– Freezing Chesley Sullenberger’s brain when he dies and inserting it into a fuzzy kitten, then conducting a photoshoot with the kitten in the cockpit of a jet.
– Splicing the DNA of Pat Tillman with that of a meerkat and taking the meerkat around to lecture high school students about courage.
– Spending billions of potentially useful biotechnical grant dollars to resurrect Leona Helmsley’s dogs; story gets bottom-left corner of an Us Weekly cover.
– Bringing back Spuds MacKenzie.
Also, the puppies are named Trust, Solace, Prodigy, Valor and Dejavu. What the hell? These are puppies, people, not frickin’ celebrity children.
