By Mike Moore
Journal Times | Posted: Thursday, August 14, 2008 12:00 am
It would be inaccurate to say I treated Nugget as equal to other family members. For a while, he outranked them.
A cheesy "No. 1 Dog" frame held a picture of my golden retriever, tongue a-wagging, on my desk for years. Neither my girlfriend at the time nor my parents ever attained that honor.
He was one of a kind. Not six of a kind.
Even if he were still around, I wouldn't be jetting off to South Korea to have him cloned. Leave that to the woman out West who reportedly received five copies of her dead pit bull.
You've probably read about Bernann McKinney and her freaky past. Not exactly the poster child the biotech company would've hand-picked. So I bummed around town to sample the opinions of more typical dog owners. You know, the ones who aren't fugitives on the run after allegedly keeping a sex slave in England.
Out at Dog Park in Caledonia, I met a perfectly normal guy named Jerry Dzindzeleta. His yellow Labrador/Irish setter mix, Barney, was itching for a walk.
They sleep in adjacent beds. They watch TV together. But Dzindzeleta would have no interest in a Barney II, even if he could afford the six-figure price tag.
"I love him more than anything in the whole world," he said, "but the cloned dog wouldn't be the same dog. He wouldn't have the memories or the association. Psychologically he would be a totally different creature. So I don't really see the sense in that."
That's a big catch. It's not a package deal where the personality is transplanted too. Unless you only dig your dog for its looks, the DNA means little.
Just look at people. My mother-in-law has an identical twin. Yet, while the two do spooky things like pick out the same greeting card hundreds of miles apart, they have developed distinct personalities.
Down at Countryside Humane Society, the staff has been following the cloned puppy stories.
"I think she's crazy," secretary/treasurer Joyce Brown said. "There are so many wonderful dogs that need humans."
True. Typically you'll find a handful of them up for adoption right in Countryside's back room with their own quirks for owners to discover.
I'm half-hearted about even owning the same breed someday. Seems like that'd blur my memory of the original.
"You might find 1 in 100 that feel the way that lady does," Brown added.
Hypothetically, at least, I found a couple of clone customers right there in the office. Animal control agent Amanda Kaiser has a Siberian husky, Kami, with the unique combo of one brown eye and one blue one. She's so attached, she'd consider it. But it'd take a bargain-basement price and a guarantee of success. No weird mutations or side effects.
"I wouldn't pay thousands of dollars to get a sick dog," Kaiser said.
The company advertises a 25 percent success rate so far. Meaning researchers are batting roughly the same as a backup infielder for the Brewers.
Last I checked, cancer hasn't been cured. This shouldn't be the priority for serious science. Randy Lansbery won't put this in that category; he's a big-time skeptic of any kind of cloning.
"Human, dog, bird, nothing," the humane officer said. "I'm all for science, but a lot of what's called science isn't science."
I can't decide if this reminds me more of "Jurassic Park" or "Pet Sematary". Either is creepy.
Margaux Meltzer, a customer service representative at Countryside, joked that some pictures of the cloned puppies snarling at their proud owner make them look evil. From the sounds of it, they might just be good judges of character.
Mike Moore can be reached at (262) 631-1724 or
mike.moore@lee.net