Should you clone your dog?
A big-name star's controversial choice of pets really got the fur flying among animal lovers -- rightly so, in the opinion of our Luke Burbank:
Barbra Streisand made news recently, not for her acting or her singing, but because it came to light that two of her dogs, Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett, were actually cloned from the cells of another one of her dogs, Samantha, who'd passed away at age 14.
Like they say in the song, "People, people who clone puppies, are the luckiest people in the world." Or something like that.
Anyway, these dogs are actually Coton de Tulears, and Babs didn't really need luck to make it happen -- just $100,000 and some help of a South Korean researcher who specializes in the practice.
Pet adoption advocates were aghast. After all, there are plenty of non-GMO dogs looking for a good home.
But the whole thing got me wondering: Should I start saving now to clone my beloved yellow lab Rudy?
My wife and I couldn't imagine life without her. And yet, after careful consideration, I've decided she should not be cloned.
For one thing, there's no guarantee her clone would have her exact personality.
Also, there's the shedding, which I'm not in any hurry to genetically replicate. Rudy sheds her entire coat roughly once per hour. And it's a constant battle involving expensive vacuums and an army of lint rollers for me and my wife to avoid being "those weird dog hair people." You know the ones: they show up at a party and you think they're wearing a beautiful mohair sweater, only to realize, it's actually a T-shirt covered in Golden Retriever.
Mostly though, I don't want to clone her because it turns out that death is actually a pretty important part of life. The reason we humans love so hard is because we know instinctively on some level that it's a limited-time offer. And I don't want to mess with that.
Not to mention that, even after she's gone, Rudy will still be with me, in a way. Because I'll be picking her fur out of my clothes until the day I die.
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Story produced by Young Kim.