You like Rocky so much, you wish you could have him forever? Well, now there's a solution -- just clone him!

For all you dog lovers out there, there’s a bad news. Many people grow so attached to their K-9s that, one day, they may have woken up with the question: what’s going to happen when Rocky passes away? I want to keep him forever! Most people will just stop there but, apparently, at least five of them didn’t — to the point where they agreed to pay the non-venial sum of US$150,000 to have their fluffy, face-licking pet cloned. Well, the bad news is that BioArts, the company that broke news for offering the world’s first commercial dog cloning service, has decided to discontinue its service.

Dolly the sheep? Just the beginning

We’ve all heard about Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from a somatic cell. Well, believe it or not, that was 14 years ago — yes, that’s right, fourteen! Meanwhile, cloning research has been pushing forward to explore new avenues. By process of nuclear transfer, the list of cloned animals to include tadpoles, carps, mice, monkeys, cattle, cats, mules, horses, buffalos, camels and, lo and behold, as of 2005, even dogs.

The fact alone of dogs may have stirred up some controversy, but the Korean company BioArts, back in the summer of 2008, pushed it even further and made headlines around the globe for offering the world’s first commercial dog cloning service. Give us a tissue sample and oh, I don’t know, 150 grand, they said, and we’ll get you a clone: you’ll be able to live with your dog forever! Cool, huh?

Needless to say, the company’s target market was spoiled millionaires with equally spoiled dogs. They ran a test trial where they accepted just five dogs for the above quoted price. Without being too open about their methodology — perhaps to spare their clients the cruel details? — they did, in fact, deliver five cloned dogs to their customers.

There are some things money can’t buy (for everything else, there’s cloning)

The recepients of the cloned dogs were all reportedly deeply satisfied of the “end product.” But they had been warned: as much as the cloned puppy may look just the same as the original, there is just no way of telling anything at all about its behaviour, which of course cloning can’t replicate.

Baaa!

Ask yourself this question: what do you like the most about your pet, the way it looks, or the way it responds to your voice, it plays with you, and enjoys your company? All of this is part of the dog’s bevariour. And for humans and animals alike, behaviour is vastly dictated not by genes, but from learning and experience. Hence, sad but true, a cloned puppy dog is, looks aside, just like any other dog — it will have to learn your previous dog’s tricks from scratch, without any kind of edge over the dumb mutt next door.

In light of this, would you really pay that much money for a dog that, at the beginning, won’t even feel yours? My suspicion is that those poor, spoiled millionaires decided to pay the price only in the blind hope that, somehow, the previous dog’s conscience would be transferred into the new puppy (is it just me, or do millionaires tend to think that money can buy everything?). That is not to say that BioArts, the puppy cloning company, didn’t warn them: just that humans seem to have a natural tendency to overlook what they don’t want know, or wish they hadn’t heard.

Sorry, ma’m — I just gave away the last one to that couple over there!

Following its five-dog trial auction, BioArts has finally announced that they will discontinue the service, listing reasons including its tiny market, the unethical, black-market competition, the unpredictable results and the fact that the entire project constituted more of a distraction for the company than a direction that they wish to explore.

It’s a sweet-and-sour news for dog lovers — yes, you may have thought cloning was a crazy idea (and I hope I reinforced this belief), but at least you wanted to have the option. Apparently, there is a competitor in the market: RNL Bio, a second south-Korean company that managed to win a legal dispute over its supposedly unauthorized breach of patents owned by BioArts and has now acquired licenses to sell cloned dogs worldwide. However, there doesn’t seem to be any mention of commercial dog cloning services from the company just yet. Perhaps that’s for the best?