If you’ve ever owned a pet, you know how difficult it is when the time comes to say goodbye to your special friend. Grieving the loss of a pet is a heartbreaking, grief-stricken process that used to be inevitable for most pet owners. Fortunately, for wealthy pet-owners that neglect the ethical implications of pet cloning, there is a way to postpone the mourning process. Developments in pet cloning have revealed that cloning animals to create an identical specimen is not only possible, but is becoming a service that companies are capitalizing on.
Viagen is an American based company that offers pet cloning services and charges $25,000 and $50,000 for cloning cats and dogs respectively. These prices are very demanding on grieving pet-owner’s wallets, but the process of cloning is more demanding on other species, such as the ones being used in these highly scientific puppy mills. With every successfully cloned pet, many animals have to suffer at the expense of one synthetic birth. The cloning process begins by collecting cultured cells from the desired pet to be cloned. Then unfertilized eggs are extracted from a surrogate animal and the nucleus is removed to wipe any DNA from the host cell. One of the somatic cells from the preserved culture is inserted into the blank egg with a needle and fused together with an electrical current. The egg is then inserted back into the surrogate, completed with a full copy of DNA, in hopes that it will develop and yield a clone of the desired pet. This process is only successful about 20% of the time, and it is repeated until a viable clone has been birthed.
Because of the low probability of a viable offspring being produced with each attempt, many animals are exploited for this business. In the early developments of pet cloning, one of the first cloned dogs took 1,000 embryo implantations and 123 surrogates. That’s roughly 8 miscarriages per surrogate. This is more than enough to cause lasting emotional and physical damage to any of the dogs involved. This information proposes a very interesting ethical question to the pet-owners who are considering this procedure. If you truly care for animals, is ten more years with your pet worth the suffering of dozens?
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-cloning-your-dog-so-wrong-180968550/
“Angela Baily” (1)
This was very informative. I had no idea it was a bad thing to clone an animal. It's so sad that it takes 8 miscarriages. I like that you took the time to do some explaining and teaching on this topic.
ReplyDelete- Lara Pereira
I’ve always been interested in cloning mostly because of the ethics behind it. Learning about how the surrogates have through go through multiple miscarriages just for someone to have a cloned pet makes me question the ethics behind it a lot more.
ReplyDelete-Jackelyn Raymundo Santizo
A lot of my classes have talked about cloning, and it always interested me. I have always thought cloning your pet was ethically wrong but now hearing that it took 8 miscarriages per surrogate, I really think it is ethically wrong. I don't think cloning your pet is a good thing in general because a clone will never have the same personality as a beloved pet.
ReplyDeleteThis post is by Jessica Ross
DeleteLike many others have commented, I also have had a good amount of classes talk about cloning. Only one class got into the ethics about it all but it was a broad question posed for us to debate. I never knew that there was such a high probability for miscarriages. Cloning is something that needs to be more ethically debated, maybe they will be able to make it more ethical in the future.
ReplyDelete- Sara Dunn
That's really interesting- I wonder how people's moral beliefs in cloning animals will play into this. As much as someone may love their pet, an exact clone of it could never replace the real thing. And does the cloning only include cloning of their appearance? What about the animals behavior and personality?
ReplyDeleteThis topic is really interesting considering how many people own pets and treat them as family. Having owned pets before, I would've definitely have loved to have them cloned, but after hearing of the negative side effects of cloning I believe it's rather unethical to have any animal go through the process.
ReplyDelete-Tikweze Namadzunda
I wonder what factors contribute to the low viability rate? Is it damaging to remove the nucleus of a cell to exchange its DNA? Do the ages and weights of the fetuses contribute mostly to the viability issue? In my opinion it just doesn't seem ethical based on the way the surrogate mothers are used.
ReplyDelete- Declan
I find this topic really interesting. I just lost my childhood dog this summer, so I know how sad it is, but I don't see how any animal lover could clone their dog if so many other dogs are hurt in the process. It seems quite selfish to me. It also makes me wonder what causes the procedure to be so unnseccesful?
ReplyDelete- Shannon Gray