If you had $50,000, would you clone your best friend? Some dog owners are saying yes. Alexandra Horowitz is senior research fellow and head of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, Columbia University. She joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the new and unregulated industry of pet cloning, its hit-or-miss successes, and if this is even something that we should be doing. Her article “Would You Clone Your Dog?” appeared in The New Yorker.
Do Dog Clones Go to Heaven?
By Sophia Anderson, Think Intern
Since nearly half of Americans lack the savings to finance a thousand-dollar emergency, dropping $50 grand on a clone of their pet is likely out of the question. But now that it’s possible to clone dogs, financing it might be the least of our worries.
“Think” brought on guest Alexandra Horowitz, who’s a senior research fellow and head of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, Columbia, to talk about the advancements that make cloning possible and the concerns they present. Her article “Would You Clone Your Dog?” was published in The New Yorker last month.
Cloning mammals isn’t as recent a feat as some might think. It’s been possible for almost thirty years, and the FDA approved the consumption of meat and milk from cloned animals in 2008. South Korea has been cloning dogs since the early 2000s.
There is only one company in the U.S. that holds the patent for cloning animals: BioGen. It was started by a billionaire – after a lot of experimentation – so that he could clone his mother’s dog. The current dog-cloning process works something like this: scientists take a DNA sample from the dog owners want to clone (a sample from the ear is preferable). These samples can be preserved for as long as you’re willing to pay for their preservation.
The skin sample is inserted into an embryo from one dog, and that embryo is inserted into the womb of yet another dog. These surrogate dogs come from unknown origins and cannot be adopted. This is the part of the process that typically presents the most ethical issues.
“[BioGen] decided not to give me or anybody else much information about who [the dogs] are,” Horowitz said. “It’s not dogs that they own. They’re not pet dogs … It’s a process very unseen to the consumer. There’s a dog who has to be used as the mother. And it’s non-voluntary.”
Horowitz added that it’s unclear which parts of the cloning process, if any, are regulated by the FDA.
Once the eight months have passed and BioGen presents you with your new pup, the question remains: is that really a new version of your dog? Or just a copy?
The people Horowitz spoke to in the process of writing her article generally accepted that their clone puppies were far from their previous dogs reincarnated. But they did think that the general “specialness” of their pets could be replicated in the DNA of their new dogs.
To some, the price tag alone renders cloning your dog a glorified science experiment. To even consider it, you’d need serious disposable income. It’s a moral quandary that really only applies to the 1%, at least for now.
But for those who can afford it, one would think that treating a beloved dog as the amalgamation of cells might be reductive. There’s the question of animals having souls to consider. Anyone who has loved a dog, cat or hamster would insist without hesitation, of course they do. So why is that missing piece forgotten? Maybe grief makes pet owners thankful for any glimpse of their dearly departed dog they can get.
- +
Transcript
Would You Clone Your Dog Podcast Full.wav
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] We know how unlikely it is that we personally share a home with the most amazing animal in history. But when we assure our canine companions that they are the best doggie ever, we mean it. We believe this despite dealing with their barking, their personality quirks, their occasional health challenges, and the fact that because of them we can’t have nice things. Their flaw is that they don’t live forever. But now some entrepreneurs are offering what sounds like the next best thing from KERA in Dallas. This is think I’m Kris Boyd. If you’ve got a properly preserved tissue sample and $50,000, you can request a cloned copy of your dog. There’s no guarantee, but if the procedure is successful, it takes about eight months from the time you place your order to the delivery of living puppy with the identical genes to the ones you have loved and lost. But even if it all goes according to plan, is it the right thing to do? Alexandra Horowitz is senior research fellow and head of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her article for The New Yorker is titled would you Clone Your Dog? Alexandra, welcome back to thank.
Alexandra Horowitz [00:01:10] Hi, Chris. Great to be back.
Krys Boyd [00:01:11] So you went to visit a guy named John Mendiola who lives on Long Island. He is a retired police officer, so presumably not somebody with enormous wealth to throw around. But he spent $50,000 having his dog, Princess, cloned after she died. What made the original princess so special?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:01:32] Well, I think that’s a question that any owner would answer with alacrity. You know there was things that to John and to other people who’ve had their dogs or cats cloned were idiosyncratic individual or in some ways producible. This was a dog who he had adopted when he was on duty, and the dog was brought in as a stray, and he wanted to kind of rescue her before she got sent to animal Care and Control. And it wound up being kind of the heart dog for John. Someone who he felt, you know, had eyes only for him in a way, you know, gave him special looks. He was very responsive, was so affectionate, in a way that anyone who lives with animals can kind of recognize. And so he was devastated when she had cancer, and it looked like she her life was going to be shorter than he’d hoped.
Krys Boyd [00:02:32] So how did he learn about the possibility of having her cloned? Well, there.
Alexandra Horowitz [00:02:38] Was, I believe, a television program that John had watched, profiling some of the early cloned dogs. So the business of cloning dogs that actually started in South Korea, in the early 2000s. And just like the cloning of Dolly, or the making of the cloned Dolly the sheep ten years earlier, it was a phenomenon and it was on everybody’s mind. People were really talking about the fact that there there was a company cloning animals, and I think it just planted a seed in his head, that maybe there was a way to preserve Princess, his dog.
Krys Boyd [00:03:21] So he had this sample taken from her body just in case he wanted to pursue this. How was it collected, and then how was it stored?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:03:32] Right? So initially, it wasn’t so easy to collect a sample that could be used as potentially the seed of, making a clone. But actually all one needs is really a skin sample, and that’s a skin sample, that a veterinary can take as a biopsy from any part of the body. The folks at Biogen, the company in Texas. Which does cloning, told me that they prefer a sample from the ear. I think it’s just easier to get a clean sample. It’s usually done either pre death, or post mortem. So he had a, biopsy taken when she was undergoing some other medical procedure already. So this wasn’t its own traumatic event. She was already, under a, under a surgeon’s care. And then he sent the biopsy, the little sample to. Biogen, the company. And there are other companies which do this as well, which just preserve the sample, enabling you to later decide whether you want to do anything with it or not.
Krys Boyd [00:04:42] So now John Mendiola has not one but two new princesses whom he pretty adorably calls Princess Ariel and Princess Jasmine. What are they like?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:04:54] According to John and I never met the original princess, although I saw videos of her. They act very similarly to the original princess. They do actually have a lot of behavioral. I’d say habits in common. When I spend an afternoon with them, you know, they have the same ardent enthusiasm for, for for chasing, moving things. Same levels of energy. You know, gladly sit on either side of John on the on the sofa. They look a little bit different, but only after you’ve started examining them. They have slightly different hair coloration, which is very common in cloning. And they have a slightly different gaze, each of them. But they look very similar. They look like twins, which in fact, they are.
Krys Boyd [00:05:43] Yeah. I was going to ask you. I understand that dogs are almost always born in litters of multiple puppies per pregnancy, but does identical twinning happen often or at all in dogs is just a natural phenomenon?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:05:56] That’s a great question. It does happen. I don’t know how often it happens. It happens just as a yeah, biological fact, but most members of a litter are not going to be twins. And you’re right. Most litters have more than have more than one healthy litter might have five or even 11 puppies, depending on the size of the breed dog.
Krys Boyd [00:06:18] So Princesses Ariel and Jasmine are physically similar to photos of the first princess physically similar to each other. I notice as I think about this Alexandra, that I keep wanting to refer to the original princess as their mother, but of course that’s not right as her.
Alexandra Horowitz [00:06:37] I thought a lot about what the what. I would say the cloned dog is considered in this relationship and it’s more antecedent, right? Or sort of predecessor. But it’s not mother. Right. Because she hasn’t passed along, her genes in with the company of another dog’s genes to make a new individual. Instead, it’s just her genes with potentially some extra genetic material from the donor dog’s eggs. So it’s just it’s all mom. It’s the same as mom, genetically.
Krys Boyd [00:07:13] So John Mendoza use this Texas based company called BioGen Pets and Equine to pursue cloning. Princess. What services do they offer broadly?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:07:25] They offer the cryopreservation of cells where people send in skin samples and they multiply the skin samples or the numbers of cells in those skin samples, and then they preserve them pretty much indefinitely, as long as you’re willing to pay for their preservation in their deep freeze blockers. That’s, done in Austin. And then they also, if should one choose to pursue it, will find, it get eggs and a donor dog to start the process of implanting that, skin sample in the egg of another dog and then putting it in a surrogate dog to be grown as an embryo and then born as a puppy.
Krys Boyd [00:08:16] We’ll talk about those other dogs involved in a minute, but how much does it cost just to have a tissue sample preserved?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:08:24] At this company, it’s, a few thousand dollars plus, I think less every year.
Krys Boyd [00:08:30] And if somebody wants to go ahead and pursue cloning, are they given like a date when they might expect an animal?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:08:40] If someone decided to pursue cloning. My guess is they don’t give a definitive date. They might tell you when the process is begun. There might have to be multiple trials before the embryo takes. So my guess is they don’t give a definitive date, but in some cases, it could be as soon as about eight months after a dog’s death. Given all the circumstantial variables, though, I don’t think they would give a guaranteed date.
Krys Boyd [00:09:09] So is this, like in vitro fertilization, in that it’s often possible to try multiple times for a successful pregnancy?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:09:19] Oh, absolutely. They try multiple times for a successful pregnancy in the case in which they wouldn’t get a pregnancy the first time. Yes, absolutely.
Krys Boyd [00:09:28] But there are no guarantees that the procedure will result in live puppies.
Alexandra Horowitz [00:09:34] I don’t think there is a guarantee, but I feel confident that Biogen would say they mostly do get. They mostly do result in the puppy. If the skin cell is preserved well, it has all the genetic material that they need to do the process.
Krys Boyd [00:09:50] How did this particular company come into existence? Like, how does anyone decide that this is going to be their business?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:09:58] Well, it was actually a really circuitous route in, in a way. It, it started years ago with an individual, billionaire who wanted to. Who had heard about the cloning of or the creation of of Dolly. Even. I see I say cloning of Dolly, but Dolly was the sheep who resulted, from the cloning procedure, that it just excited a lot of imaginations. And he thought he’d like to clone his mother’s dog, with whom she had a really strong relationship. And she he created a project. He called it the Simplicity Project, and put a lot of money into research to look at how this could be done with non sheep cells. Eventually through lots of. Different vacillations. He finally turned into a company that was purchased, that was created, converged with a company that had an agricultural interest that was cloning, cattle, for instance. And pigs. Pigs were a big research subject, and ultimately they started cloning. I don’t know if anyone in the beginning thought this is going to be a business of cloning dogs. I think it just evolved out of looking at what one could do biologically and also looking at the possible demand.
Krys Boyd [00:11:20] But there are now, I guess, multiple companies in the industry.
Alexandra Horowitz [00:11:26] They are the only ones that hold the patent. The Roslin patent for cloning. So they are the only US cloner. However, there are clones in in South Korea who I think they just kind of have, a kind of mutual agreement to. Coexist kind of understanding, with these other companies. And that other company has spawned little sub companies in different countries. But in the US the patent is owned by Biogen. That’s an employee.
Krys Boyd [00:11:58] So is there any regulation whatsoever applied to a company like this? If they are the only ones doing what they’re doing?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:12:06] Isn’t that an interesting question, Chris? Well, so there are so many levels at which there could be regulation. There’s regulation. And so far as you’re keeping. Animals to serve as surrogates, for instance, or keeping animals to donate their eggs to be used in the process because you need donor eggs to be used in the process. And even the process itself could be regulated as a pet industry process. I do not believe it has any regulations. The the keeping animals for breeding, for use and breeding purposes that is regulated in some ways by the FDA. Right. There’s certain standards for keeping animals. If you’re a large scale breeder, some small scale breeders kind of go under the threshold. So FDA requirements don’t apply to them. But the FDA has approved, you know, cloning as a process for non-humans. It was really the cloning of humans that everybody got very excited about at the time of Dolly. And there is, definitely, no possibility of that happening now.
Krys Boyd [00:13:17] It’s physically possible. It’s just illegal, right?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:13:21] It is probably physically possible. It would be exactly the same process that happens with any other non-human. But yes, there are laws against it.
Krys Boyd [00:13:30] Just to step back here for a minute, Alexandra. We’ve talked a bit about Dolly the sheep. How long have scientists had the ability to successfully clone mammals?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:13:40] Well, she was really the first, cloned sheep. However, in the early 20th century, researchers started to look at how you could. Make new individuals. In fact, there was a, the Nobel Prize for medicine was won by making new Claude frogs from, the intestinal cells of tadpoles. So there was research burgeoning and lots of fronts in the middle of the 20th century. And then it kind of consolidated and came together with this creation of Dolly.
Krys Boyd [00:14:16] I think what you just referred to is, is this concept of genomic equivalence.
Alexandra Horowitz [00:14:21] That’s right. Right. And the phenomenon of genomic equivalence was surprising. In other words, it was suspected. But we didn’t realize that the DNA in all cells of our body is identical. Once you realize that, you realize that if you want to create a new individual, you don’t just have to look at cells typically involved in reproduction. You can take any cell in the body and create another version of it, and then maybe create a whole individual of that species.
Krys Boyd [00:14:54] And why is that such a big deal for the technology?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:14:57] Well, for the technology. What’s thrilling is that, I mean, biologically, it’s interesting that, all the cells in the body have the same DNA, right? That they’re just expressed differently to take on different roles and that even after expression, they can kind of remember, you know, their original code and then sort of remake another person. That’s the stuff of science fiction, really. And in fact, science fiction writers have been thinking about this for quite a long time. The idea that we could be we could replicate ourselves, right? Make many, many soldier individuals or make infinite numbers of animals used for food just by taking any skin cell from one of them. So the fact that biology actually allows this was considered phenomenal.
Krys Boyd [00:15:47] Many people listening may recall the headlines around Dolly the sheep back in the mid-nineties, when she became the first cloned mammal ever born. There was tons of fanfare when she came into the world, but she did have some health problems, right?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:16:02] Yeah, she did, and it’s not clear how much of that had to do with the cloning process, per se. Her life was a little bit shorter than you’d expect of, an individual of her species, but I can’t say that that was because she was a cloned animal. But absolutely everybody was very excited about the possibility of cloning, but then also concerned that some mutation would be introduced by making that animal, for instance, unable to bear young of their own, or just having some other abnormality that, ended their life because I think in mind for many people was is this something that will be eventually useful for humans?
Krys Boyd [00:16:44] How much has the technology evolved or improved since 1996, when Dolly was born? Are we still doing this essentially the same way?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:16:53] As far as I understand it. And I am not a cloning biologist, but it is essentially the same way. But the process has been refined innumerable times to make the process more efficient. So in other words, the efficiency has to do with, how good your original sample of cells is. Whether they are successfully stored and reproduced and stored. Then in addition, how many embryos you have to make? So how many age you have to use? And how many times those have to be transplanted into a surrogate animal? From then on it’s mostly a normal pregnancy. But all of those parts of the process, have been refined. I think, though fundamentally it’s the same in nucleate. Or take the nucleus out of one egg and put the sample information into that nucleus.
Krys Boyd [00:17:50] So cloning embryos remains a pretty high tech process, but gestating embryos has to still be done the old fashioned way. There are other dogs involved in this process.
Alexandra Horowitz [00:18:00] That’s right. It’s it does involve other individual dogs, right. Who are living their lives. Part of their lives is being the what is tended to call surrogate, of these clone eggs.
Krys Boyd [00:18:17] Who are these other dogs? Where do they come from?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:18:20] Well, it’s very hard to tell. BioGen has really gone kind of trade secret on that. They decided not to give me or anybody else much information about who they are. They’re probably dogs used for, from what I understand, for breeding in various ways. Maybe they’re use by breeders. There are lots of large and small scale breeders of dogs, but which is not a phenomenon in which we find that surprising, all over the country. And maybe they, rent out their dogs for use for this process. Once in a while. There might be, although I don’t have any evidence of this, but they neither did they give me, any proof against it. There might be more large scale breeding facilities which make lots of dogs who are going to be used for various purposes. And those dogs might be rented by, a company like Biogen for use as a surrogate in all events. It’s not dogs that they own. They’re not pet dogs. It’s not somebody saying, gee, I want to clone, you know, Fido, and I’m I’m going to put Fido’s clone in my other dog, Rover. It’s, you know, a process where unseen to the consumer, there’s a dog who has to be used as the mother. And, you know, it’s non voluntary.
Krys Boyd [00:19:40] Is the dog used as a gestational surrogate necessarily the dog whose eggs were harvested in the first place for the procedure?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:19:49] She’s probably not the dog whose eggs were harvested. That probably is a separate dog as well. But again, Biogen simply doesn’t give information about that process. In the South Korean case. As I said, they do dog cloning as well. There was a lab that began dog cloning, and it and some of the individuals in that lab have gone different directions, but there are still cloning happening as a, as a retail business. And they in the past have written about dogs who were kept as research animals, being used as donor dogs, and dogs who were or dogs who were otherwise maybe going to be, used for other purposes, being, surrogates. And those are probably separate because each of those procedures, putting embryos into a dog or taking eggs out of a dog is a surgical procedure, and it has to be timed very carefully. And so you can’t just use one dog one time.
Krys Boyd [00:20:46] I never went through IVF, but I have friends who did, and my understanding is that it can be pretty physically and emotionally taxing. Now, obviously the dogs being used as egg donors don’t sort of know what’s happening, but do we know if it makes them physically uncomfortable, or are they injected with hormones in the same way that an expectant mother, a prospective expectant mother, would be?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:21:11] No, I don’t think they are injected with hormones. Instead, they, their hormonal levels would be closely traced so that you could find the best time to extract eggs. Is that an easy or benign procedure? No, it’s still not an easy or benign procedure, but they they wouldn’t be in the same situation that someone who has to inject hormones to try to kind of, jumpstart the process of egg making is they would be younger dogs, for instance, who are naturally making eggs, and if they weren’t naturally making eggs, they wouldn’t be used for the process.
Krys Boyd [00:21:50] So we’ll assume that the egg donor dogs and the gestational surrogate dogs have their physical needs for food and shelter met. Do these dog surrogates have anybody to look after their social and emotional well-being, their quality of life?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:22:06] Well, they’re owned by what Bijan called their production partners. These these breeders or whoever the individuals are who have dogs who can be used for this purpose. And I and I wasn’t able to have access to those facilities or people to ask that question. I think that when they’re in the care of the people who, are going to take care of the puppies for their clients, that they’re taken care of, right? And they get to see their their puppies, as it were. Maybe not their puppies, but the puppies that are born out of them, over the weeks of their young puppy hood. And then they’d be returned to their adoption partner. So we don’t really know their circumstances very well. They have to be healthy enough to be useful in this process. Right. And a healthy dog is going to be achieved by, you know, some level of good care. But we know that even a dog who is unhealthy, as in lots of breeding scenarios, can bear puppies. Again and again and again. So it’s it’s just unknown, Chris. We don’t know.
Krys Boyd [00:23:14] The thing about this, Alexandra, is that, you know, you have these very special dogs that are being cloned, that are so beloved that somebody wants to, in a manner of speaking, extend their lives. And then you have these, like, unnamed, kind of invisible, behind the scenes dogs that that people don’t seem to value in quite the same way except as commodities.
Alexandra Horowitz [00:23:35] I mean, I think that’s really interesting observation, Chris. You know, I came into it as a person who, like lots of people listening, maybe lives with a dog, and in fact, dogs who have recently died and. I give them so much value in my life, right? I absolutely feel like I would have done so much to hold on to that dog, given a good quality of life. But the idea that other dogs of any sort. Good dogs, bad dogs, big or small, kind of doesn’t matter in my mind. On reflection, have to be used in order to kind of extend their life. Is is really interesting. I mean, I think to me, that’s the big philosophical quandary at the heart of what is, I think, often a really, like, well-meaning gesture, somebody who has such love and interest in a non-human animal that they want to, you know, keep knowing them, as it were, the idea that, well, maybe you can and maybe you can. You can definitely keep their genetic self alive. But you need to forsake other dogs. You know, there are lots of parts of our life where I think you have to do that. Where we decide one animal is going to their life is going to be compromised so that, someone else’s life can be better. And that might be we kill animals for food. Because we enjoy eating that food, or we aren’t concerned about, breeding animals circumstance because we just want the puppies that come out of her. There are lots of places that culturally, we’re very familiar with that. And we have societally, I guess, accepted it. This is a new way in which we’re establishing that relationship with animals, that we value some, and that we do value others.
Krys Boyd [00:25:29] Do we know what happens to these dogs used for purposes of breeding, once they sort of age out of being likely to carry a healthy pregnancy?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:25:39] No we don’t. I know that in some circumstances, the surrogates, the companies request that the partners adopt out the surrogates. It will be different in every case. So they may or may not. They don’t have control over that. And if the production partner, as they call them, once wants to do something else with the dog, they own the dog, right? So they have rights to do that. I know that the companies Biogen’s CEO Blake Russell has one of the dogs who was a surrogate for one of the procedures. He did. He he then adopted that dog. It’s unusual that we know the fate of one of the dogs who serves as surrogates. I imagine that it probably could be done differently, but as yet, I don’t know that there’s been pressure on them to to do it differently.
Krys Boyd [00:26:25] Maybe Alexandra to get rid of at least the need for dog surrogates to carry these pregnancies. Is there any way currently for like, cloned animals to develop in some kind of artificial womb?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:26:37] I think that research is being done to that effect, but I don’t think there is a way thus far. No, I mean, the environment of a living body is designed to really provide the, care and nutrients that growing bodies need. So I don’t think they’ve successfully done that. At least not in a scale that would yet reach a retail space. But, you know, I talked to some bioethicists about their opinions of cloning, and one of them had something really interesting to say. It was Jessica Pearce who, is someone I’ve seen write about, our ownership of dogs, especially, and how to think about ownership of animals in general. And she said that, you know, for her, even if the dogs were somehow gestated outside of a surrogate dog, let’s say no other dogs had to be involved for her. It’s still was something which she thought was ethically repulsive, because she thought that the whole what a wall to a point was that the whole concept is about just diminishing the the dignity of some dogs in order to elevate and perpetuate our ownership of other dogs. You know, this idea of them as property that can be really just considered as something we own and therefore multiplied, or whose life could be ended because we are done with ownership, right, is really put into stark relief. So, even if that came to pass, I, I know that there are questions and valid questions about whether that would actually be an improvement in this in the whole situation.
Krys Boyd [00:28:27] I mean, those concerns make a lot of sense to me at the same time. It is easy to identify with people who love their dogs so much and have the money lying around that they want to pursue cloning, maybe without thinking too carefully about what that really entails for other dogs they’ll never meet.
Alexandra Horowitz [00:28:45] I completely understand the urge that the people who I talked to who, cloned dogs or who hoped to clone dogs or who maybe have never thought about it, but live with dogs and just express, you know, express their pleasure and and at that’s relationship they have with a dog. I very much understand the desire to not have that. And and so I think not just for philosophers or ethicists, but for all of us, it really brings to a head the issues of what it means to have a dog and what it means to have that relationship. I’ve lived with many dogs and none of them, when their life ended was I was I delighted about the ending of their life? You know, it was devastating. And getting another dog to live with was not the solution in any way. I wanted that animal, that individual, back in my life, like we do with anyone who dies. So I really understand it. Then you come up with this sort of interesting question of, is it the same individual? Right? Or are we just talking about the pretense of extending a life when the life ran its natural course? Maybe it could have been a little bit shorter, or it could have been a little bit longer along the way, the quality of life could have been a little bit better or worse. But that relationship and that individual, you know, came to an end and we all come to an end and we have trouble grappling with that. And some might look at this as a way to kind of bypass that, but I don’t think we can bypass that.
Krys Boyd [00:30:19] Alexandra, the original princess, died of cancer. Is there any reason to worry that her clones might be destined to suffer a similar fate? Is there anything that can be done to prevent that?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:30:33] Is such an interesting question. I absolutely if it’s something that was genetically predisposed, her clones have inherited as it were, that same genetic predisposition. And so it’s interesting to think about the fact that one’s, you know, any deleterious result of having the genes you have would, would also be reproduced. We don’t we don’t have a way yet. Although certainly people are thinking, worrying and thinking about this to extract just those genes that predispose one to cancers, say, or Alzheimer’s or dementia. On the other hand, it could have been as a result of some environmental influence which the clones won’t encounter, so there’s no way to guarantee it, but neither is there any way to avert it.
Krys Boyd [00:31:21] I want to be clear here. Even as the technology has improved, most cloned dog embryos die before birth. A fair number, I guess, come into the world with physical deformities. What happens to the imperfect but living clones?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:31:38] Well, clones who are born but are so imperfect that they’re not going to survive for very long, die very young. Right? And that does happen. Clothes that don’t look like what the client wants. That could certainly happen. Or maybe they’re just multiple clones, and the client really only wanted one, right? There’s no control. Just as an IVF necessarily. There’s no control on on the number you get. You could get multiple. Barbra Streisand got got several. For instance, when she cloned her dog. What Biogen tells me is that if their dogs are that are unwanted, they’re able to find homes for them elsewhere. And I know that a number of employees happily lived with dogs who were cloned by a plant, but wound up being less desired than the clone they took home. So no, Biogen tries to account for all the dogs who were actually born, but certainly they can’t. Repair, dogs who are, you know, have some sort of fatal defect at birth, and that will happen occasionally.
Krys Boyd [00:32:46] Your sense is that cloning is maybe an extension of the popularity of dogs that are pure bred to maintain certain characteristics. I, to be honest, I had no idea that purebred dogs were more popular than mixed breeds. Maybe because mixed breeds are all I’ve ever had. But I mean, breeding dogs this way is also inherently an unnatural process, right? It’s human intervention at work.
Alexandra Horowitz [00:33:11] Yeah, absolutely. It is. And there are. And I think that, Biogen very much thinks that this is sort of like a the new breeding practice. And we’ve accepted societally breeding, basically keeping dogs and interbreeding them with dogs who, they might be somewhat closely related with to produce new dogs who have the kind of characteristics and appearance, especially that we like, that’s completely accepted, although it’s relatively new. You know, pure breeding really didn’t take off until Victorian England. So we’re talking about the last 200 years, being the history of pure breeding. You could also say all domestication really is an interference with animals lives. And we’ve certainly accepted domestication for thousands and thousands of years. You know, for dogs, it may be that we were domesticating dogs, or at least they were hurdling toward domestication, you know, 14 or 20,000 years ago.
Krys Boyd [00:34:08] I have to ask you, as a dog cognition expert, I mean, pure breeding obviously will reproduce particular physical traits in an animal that are, you know, have been declared standard by some organization or another. But but lots of people also believe that breeds have temperamental traits. What do you know about the accuracy of that?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:34:30] It’s certainly the case that breed organizations or organizations formed by individuals who either are breeders or just really love a certain breed and and want to take care to perpetuate that breed, will talk about personality characteristics and almost behaviors that you can expect from a dog who has this lineage. There hasn’t been any science that has confirmed across the board that the personality traits that breed clubs, attribute to their members are really hold up. I mean, in some cases, there’s a lot of confirmation bias, right? If you think that if you claim that your dog, your breed of dog is, is a friendly dog, you know, probably most of the dogs are going to be friendly, but not necessarily because they come from that genetic stock. On the other hand, there has been some research that shows that there’s so much variation within breeds, looking genetically and behaviorally that you could actually say there’s more variation within a single breed then there is between breeds on most personality characteristics. So I find that very interesting. Nonetheless, people will continue to say, oh, you know, German Shepherds are friendly and, and, Dobermans are proud and so forth. I think it’s just part of the human condition that we feel like we want to say what that breed is like as a guarantee, but personality is not guaranteed.
Krys Boyd [00:36:00] I mean, aside from the ethical concerns, and I having read this piece, I now share them. The ultimate question for me is, is temperament right? We often love our specific dogs because of how we’ve learned they behave and how they relate to us. What do we know about how much clones tend to act in ways that resemble the animal that provided their source DNA?
Alexandra Horowitz [00:36:23] What we know is from the people who have had their dogs cloned, and they have a very strong predisposition. And my experience to see the things which match the previous stock. So we don’t have any evidence about that. Although I also talk to people who had a cloned dog and they say, oh, they’re nothing like the original. Actually, I still love them, but they’re nothing like the original. So there’s a little bit of acknowledgment of the fact that personality isn’t just genetics. I mean, what they’re like is going to be completely a part of, not just their genes, but who they’re exposed to, who they meet, where they live, what they eat, what happens to them are their, you know, that’s that is, it seems to me, the stuff of the relationship that we make with the dog. I loved with my dog Finnegan, but he wasn’t the kind again that I loved when I met him. Right. He was going to be, you know, but only after we’ve lived years together. And I think that’s the really interesting part of it to me about who these dogs are, is that it does feel less about the individual dog than about the relationship you make with the dog. You can’t guarantee that in a genetic blueprint.
Krys Boyd [00:37:41] And of course, by definition, clones will start life in very different circumstances than their predecessors.
Alexandra Horowitz [00:37:49] Absolutely right. To say nothing of the fact that the person who they’re going to live with, has these expectations about their who they might be. But one of the things that I remember, like Russell, the CEO of Biogen, saying to me, they they also cloned a lot of horses. And actually that’s a very big part of their business. Horses used for rodeo or horses used by polo players, in South America and elsewhere. They were, I think, like said, they were making a clone for, an individual one to use a horse for rodeo purposes for this sport, where they’re used to getting a horse a few years into their life. But having been trained by a trainer ahead of time. And so when Biogen was ready to deliver this horse to the client, the client said, no, no, no, I want the horse. Give me the horse in three years, because they weren’t used to having a young horse, right? They sort of thought, they’re going to get that older horse who they now know and who knows them and who they’ve been through things with. They were going to get that horse again. But of course, I think that’s at the heart of all of it, right? The thing again, I think about and I keep going back to Finnegan, that’s if he was really the dog I, you know, I treasured the relationship with him. I’m thinking about the Finnegan when he’s an adult and not really the Finnegan when he’s six months old or four months old or a year even, because that was a part of his story. But that’s behind us. And as much as I’d like to be able to revisit it, that’s that’s not really who he is. He became who he was with me.
Krys Boyd [00:39:30] Yeah, it makes me think, Alexandra, about. And I hope that I’m not offending people with the comparison. But you hear these stories of identical twins or even triplets who were separated at birth, unbeknownst to one another, and grew up in very different circumstances. They do have some things in common, but when they meet, they may not ultimately instantly bond because they don’t have history together.
Alexandra Horowitz [00:39:52] Absolutely. And I think the stories we love to hear of identical twins who were separated at birth is that they share characteristics. And I remember teaching Introduction to Psychology and talking about the the twins who found each other late in life, and they were both named Jim, and they both married a woman named Linda. They both had, you know, like the same kind of beer and drove the same kind of pickup truck. And that’s feels very exciting because the idea that really there was something genetic that you share with someone else so that it would express itself in the same way is, is appealing to us. But in point of fact, right, there’s absolutely given different environments. There’s going to be more different than there is similar in those individuals. And as much as they might have a connection, nobody would say they’re the same person. They wouldn’t say they’re the same person, I believe. And the idea that you’re getting the same one back. That should extend itself to what we’re thinking about non-human animals as well. The biology is not so different.
Krys Boyd [00:40:59] What did you learn about why cloning clients choose to spend so much money replacing or attempting to replace a beloved animal, rather than searching among the supply of dogs born the old fashioned way for someone else who might be different, but still be an amazing companion that they can fall in love with.
Alexandra Horowitz [00:41:20] You know, I think that the money question is. I mean, it’s an issue for anybody who was thinking of doing this. It’s it’s not a trivial amount of money. But that was a kind of side question for that. Right. It was sort of how can I make this happen? I think John told me he sold his car, right? Like, he, you know, he you get you go into reserves. If there’s something that’s you value, it’s worth more to you than a than a new car. Holy cow. So I think that the money was not the issue. And it’s interesting to me because a lot of people, when they hear about it, they think $50,000. That’s outrageous. I think the thing that’s maybe outrageous has something to do with, you know, who’s being used for it and who the animal really is. On the other hand, what I, what I learned about these people was that, you know, they. These were often people who had many dogs, right? And there was just one dog who who they connected with and who they wanted to reproduce. And maybe even with the clone that they get, they wouldn’t reproduce her. It’s something about it’s really just an expression of, of people identifying with the time of their life and another individual with their life who happens to be a dog and wanted to hold on to that. Something that I think we can all really understand. And something which I hope they. I hope they don’t regret what they did, because I think that they now have to create a new, different relationship with another dog. And that takes a little bit of a leap of faith every time.
Krys Boyd [00:42:54] You did learn that many more people store tissue samples with Biogen, then actually move forward with the cloning process. What might the reasons be for that other than like, they never can scrape together the $50,000.
Alexandra Horowitz [00:43:11] Yeah. The the head of the lab in South Korea. Who? Has spoken a lot more about this, in the press over the years. They clone the first dog named Snuffy. He said grief is really the catalyst for cloning, and I would extend that and say the grief of losing a pet is the catalyst for storing the cells of the pet. It’s sort of the. Hopefulness that. I could just put this aside for now and then. Maybe in the future, I’ll get the money or whatever it is to go through with the cloning. And I think what people might find, those people who’ve stored cells but then have never cloned, which is the vast majority of people who’ve stored cells. Is that the grief fades, right? Or they form a new relationship with another animal, or they decide they don’t want to live with an animal, or they realize that it’s more complex than they were thinking in that moment. In the five days after the dog’s death, that they had to gather the sample and try to preserve them. I mean, that’s a very intense, acute, traumatic time for people. And. We might do things, then impulsively that then on later reflection, we decide actually or ethically more questionable or just unnecessary in some cases. So I think that accounts for this difference between the number of stored cells and the number of cloning clients.
Krys Boyd [00:44:43] Alexandra Horowitz, a senior research fellow and head of the Dog Cognition Lab at Columbia University’s Barnard College. Her article for The New Yorker is titled would you clone your Dog? Alexandra, it’s always nice to speak with you. Thanks for making the time.
Alexandra Horowitz [00:44:56] Thanks, Chris. Happy to talk to you.
Krys Boyd [00:44:59] You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and subscribe to the podcast. Any place you like to get your podcasts. Or if it’s easier, just go to our website to listen. Thanks, Keras. Org. Again, I’m Chris Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
