London Any pet that helps its teenage owner conquer bulimia and depression deserves a lifetime of love and treats. But the reward meted out to a sausage-dog called Winnie may be regarded as unnatural — and even cruel — by many animal lovers.
The 12-year-old dachshund has become the first dog in Britain to be cloned, after owner Rebecca Smith won a contest held by a South Korean company — Sooam Biotech Research Foundation — with the purpose of publicising its cloning technique.
Sooam’s technology allowed a “mini-Winnie” to be spawned, genetically identical to the original, but pupped by an unrelated animal.
After a piece of skin was taken from Winnie and transported to Seoul, a cell from that skin sample was placed inside a hollowed-out egg and electricity was used to spark fertilisation. Then the embryo was implanted inside a mongrel dog that acted as a surrogate womb.
The cloned puppy was born via Caesarean on March 30, weighing just over 1lb. It must spend the first six months of its life in quarantine before it can begin living with Rebecca.
Viewers of Channel 4’s documentary The £60 000 Puppy (£60 000 is the fee Sooam would normally charge to clone a dog) saw Rebecca, 30, and her family close to tears as they described how the original Winnie’s affectionate personality and doggy optimism had helped them through a nightmare of mental illness.
“Without Winnie I don’t know where you’d be,” Rebecca’s mother told her earnestly. “Winnie has saved you.”
The dachshund was an 18th birthday present for Rebecca, at a time when she was “having lots of demons”. The pet helped her overcome the eating disorder she had strugged with for years.
Now, with their beloved Winnie elderly and arthritic, the Smiths faced a sorrowful parting that confronts all dog-lovers. “She’s very special, but she’s not going to be around for ever,” said Rebecca, a caterer in London.
Rebecca cannot bear to imagine a life without her canine friend. “When Winnie dies, I’ll have to move, because every time I go for a walk I’ll think of her, and I honestly won’t be able to cope,” she said. “I just love her so much, I really do.”
Millions will understand — but many would recoil from the concept of manufacturing a genetic copy. For one thing, there is the cost. Sooam Biotech justifies the colossal price-tag by pointing to the multi-millions spent on developing the technology.
Experts emphasise the fact that cloning cannot revive a dead pet. The new animal might look identical, but it will have different experiences, perhaps even a different personality.
The Kennel Club said it was “genuinely shocked” by Sooam’s contest, and added that there is little guarantee “mini Winnie” will resemble her namesake in anything but looks.
Professor Robin Lovell-Badge, an expert in genetics at the National Institute For Medical Research in London, said: “I see no valid justification for cloning pets.
“It is a ridiculous waste of money and hope as well as being ethically very dubious.”
Yet nothing can diminish Rebecca’s delight.
“I saw it being born and it looks exactly like Winnie,” she insists. “It is identical. Personality-wise, I couldn’t tell you because it doesn’t see and it doesn’t hear yet — it is just a little sausage dog that wriggles around drinking milk.”
The technology that makes cloning possible first hit the headlines almost 20 years ago. Dolly the sheep was created by scientists at Edinburgh University in 1996, but was plagued by health problems and put down at the relatively young age of six.
The biologist who cloned Dolly, Sir Ian Wilmut, said he did not believe cloned animals automatically inherited the character of the original — the essence that had made them so loved in the first place — and warned that owners could be disappointed.
Many viewers of the C4 film will have reached the same conclusion, after seeing the two Maltese terriers, tiny white bundles of fluff, brought to Britain as “product samples” by Korean scientists.
They are both cloned from the same original dog.
The animals looked identical, but had been raised by different owners, and had very different natures.
One was docile, an easy-going lap-dog who enjoyed endless tummy tickles. The other was bad-tempered and snappish, constantly lunging at other animals and trying to bite the fingers of anyone who touched it.
This dog was called Banya, which means “wisdom” in Korean. But the scientists had a different nickname for it — they called it “The Evil One”.
Whether Banya’s vicious nature was due to its training, or was caused by a defect in cloning, was not explained.
But, clearly, if an adored and placid family pet were replaced by a clone that looked identical but was vicious and spiteful, owners would be heartbroken.
They would face a miserable choice between having the animal, though it looked so much like their dearest friend, rehomed or even put to sleep — or living with a foul-tempered, dangerous pet.
To make that dilemma even more bitter, there would be the knowledge that the entire sorry experiment had cost £60 000.
Animal-lover Edgar Otto from Miami, Florida, has no such regrets. He became the first US owner of a cloned dog, when a gene sample from Lancelot, his favourite labrador, was cloned four years ago.
So how similar is the cloned Lancelot to his parent?
Edgar, a millionaire entrepreneur in his 80s, said: “It’s the same dog. The same dog in every way. He not only looks the same, he behaves the same, he moves the same, he is the same. We never expected him to turn out to be so identical. The interesting thing is that, when we took the dog home to meet our other eight dogs, he was accepted into the pack without a single growl. They immediately accepted him as being the old dog.”
Sooam, which in 2005 produced Afghan hound Snuppy — the world’s first cloned dog — has so far sold cloned dogs to owners in the US, Australia, India and China. The competition that brought mini-Winnie into the world was designed to help it break into the UK market.
Dr Insung Hwang, one of the lead researchers at Sooam, says cloning “is able to prolong the companionship with your dog by bringing back the memories that you have with your friend. It’s pretty much like getting an identical twin”.
But he also admits some breeds may not produce clones that look quite the same — a Dalmatian’s spots may be different, for example, or eye colouring could vary.
And the cloned dog’s personality? He concedes that nurture, as well as nature, plays a role.
But don’t his clients — who have spent tens of thousands of pounds bringing a pet into the world — think they are bringing their dead dog back to life? “I can’t control what our clients think about the cloning procedure,” he says.
There are other concerns. The cloning process leads to some puppies being born with disabilities or malformations.
Dr Hwang estimates that 90 percent of the pregnancies he achieves are healthy — which, of course, means that one in ten is not. He points out that even naturally conceived pregnancies have risks.
“If the puppy has a huge malformation, it probably won’t be able to survive, but we are usually not talking about anything very serious — the puppy might have a thicker neck than normal or a larger tongue. Most of our clients are very determined to adopt these dogs because they love the original and know the clones are from their original pet.”
There is no doubt that dog cloning leaves many of us feeling uneasy. When I sought opinions on a dog-lovers’ internet forum, the response was uniformly against the process: “morbid and quite creepy”, “ridiculous”, “a definite no”, “totally weird”.
Yet there are a growing number of satisfied customers around the world. Edgar Otto is one of them. He has no qualms about the ethics of dog cloning — but, revealingly, he does not think cloning should stop there.
If a pet owner can “bring back” a much-loved pet, ought a parent one day have the right to bring back, say, a child who has died prematurely? Is human cloning morally acceptable?
“Why not?” says Edgar.
For now, Britain is now waking up to cloned dogs, and it will be fascinating to see whether Rebecca Smith’s new puppy is just like her old one — or a different beast entirely. - Daily Mail