Kendra DeFord will tell you she isn’t out of her mind. She just loves her dog.
Her 12-year-old Pomeranian, Sassy Frassy Tee, has the run of the home DeFord shares with her husband Warner in Macon, Ga. Whenever DeFord leaves the house, she brings Sassy along. Sassy shares DeFord’s bed. Sassy has her own eye doctor, and her own heart doctor (“better doctors than we have”).
“The dog is really my life. I put her first,” says DeFord. “I’m not even going to have children till after she goes. And I’m getting to an age where, if I’m going to have kids, I need to have them soon. But [not] until she’s gone. I don’t want her to think she’s not No. 1, because she is.”
And if DeFord gets her way, someday Sassy will have her own clone.
“It’s so hard to explain without people thinking I’m crazy,” DeFord says.
Like hundreds of other pet owners around the country, DeFord has had cells from Sassy frozen in hopes of eventually having her favorite non-human cloned. DeFord’s dream may be a little closer to reality following last month’s announcement that researchers at Texas A&M University have cloned a domestic short-haired cat — the first house pet to be cloned.
The arrival of the feline facsimile, named Cc (for Copycat), is a significant step in the area of cloning, not so much for the technology involved as for the implications. With the nation’s pet population now standing at 75.6 million cats and 60.2 million dogs, according to the Humane Society of the United States, pet cloning has a huge pool of prospective customers, and several companies, sniffing profits, are deeply involved in either animal-cloning research, pet-tissue banking, or both.
Still, don’t expect anyone to be churning out cat and dog clones any time soon. Or maybe ever.
“[Before Cc’s birth] we were telling clients who’d call wanting to preserve tissue cells from their cat, ‘Well, you know, we don’t know if cloning a cat will ever happen,’ ” says Brett Reggio, scientific director of Lazaron BioTechnologies, a Baton Rouge, La., company that has done tissue preservation for “a couple hundred” pet owners. “Now we can tell them, ‘Yes, someone has cloned a cat,’ and that’s a great step forward. But when will that become commercially viable? When will it become available to you? That’s hard to say. It might never become a commercially viable business. We don’t know that.”
If there’s a top dog in the pet-cloning business, it’s Genetic Savings and Clone, the Texas- and California-based gene banking and cloning company that funds and manages Texas A&M’s Missyplicity Project, which produced Cc.
The Missyplicity Project was started in 1997 as an effort to clone Missy, the mixed-breed dog owned by the mother of Lou Hawthorne, CEO of Genetic Savings and Clone. According to Ben Carlson, the company’s vice president of communications, a clone of 11-year-old Missy could be only a year away. Or it could be longer, depending on whether nature cooperates.
“It’s very difficult when it comes to the science to make a prediction,” he says. “Cc was the result of . . . 87 embryos that did not go to full term. It’s just a numbers game.
“And it’s a very slow process. Dogs have a very complicated reproductive system, so it’s a big challenge for us.”
“We really think within the next three to five years we’re going to see the first cloned dog,” Lazaron’s Reggio says. “Everybody’s racing right now to be the first to do the dog. They raced to be the first to do the cat. Once that happens, then the real work begins. How do you optimize it? How do you maximize the efficiency?
A simple process
The cloning procedure itself is relatively simple. An egg has its nucleus removed, and genetic material from the donor cell is then fused with the egg via an electrochemical stimulus. The egg is then placed in an incubator, where it begins embryonic development before transfer to a surrogate mother of the same species.
The embryo has to be implanted in the surrogate’s womb at the right time of her reproductive cycle. And that’s the rub with dogs and cats.
“All the farm animals that have been cloned so far, we know the basic reproductive biology of their estrus cycle, we know when they come into heat, when’s the best time to put embryos in,” Reggio says. “We don’t know that for dogs. And we have limited information on cats.”
Cyagra, a subsidiary of Advanced Cell Technologies of Worcester, Mass., is the leader in the cloning of farm animals, specializing in cattle. Like Genetic Savings and Clone and Lazaron, Cyagra also banks pet cells.
At Genetic Savings and Clone, dog embryos have been produced and transferred to surrogates, but have failed to take because they were implanted at the wrong stage of the dog’s cycle. Right now, it’s a matter of hit or miss. And until researchers get the bugs ironed out, all pet owners can do is wait — and preserve tissue.
The tissue-preservation process is also relatively simple. It’s done by the pet owner’s veterinarian, who, using a kit provided by the tissue bank, conducts a short outpatient procedure. A skin sample is taken from the animal’s belly and/or inside its mouth, then the sample is shipped to the company, which makes sure the cells are viable and then places them in liquid nitrogen. There the cells will stay until science catches up. The cost of a tissue deposit ranges from $700 to about $1,000. Maintaining the tissue runs some $100 to $120 a year. Vet costs are extra.
Estimates are that the cost of cloning a pet could initially hit $250,000, but once the procedure is perfected many think the price will fall to $20,000 — and maybe as little as $3,000 well down the line. Cost, though, is just one hurdle.
Maybe a bigger roadblock is the baggage attached to cloning.
“I called my regular vet,” DeFord says, recounting her effort to find someone to take Sassy’s tissue sample. “When you mention the word cloning, people freak out. She’s like, `I’m not gonna mess with that.’ Then I called another vet, and he said, `No, it’s against my morals, I’m not gonna do it.'”
So DeFord — with Sassy in tow, of course — drove 15 hours to Texas A&M to have the tissue sample taken.
Kara Clarke, who owns a New York investment firm and has banked tissue from her standard poodle Jacques Cousteau (he died last year), believes it’s a matter of education.
“I don’t know how ethical [cloning] is,” she says. “There’s room for debate. The people who are against it, I just think they’re not well-informed.
“I think it’s wonderful — just wonderful — that we’re so advanced that we can do this.”
Not everyone shares her enthusiasm.
PETA speaks out
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals organization has strongly denounced animal cloning. The Humane Society of the U.S. has called it “wrong-headed” and expressed “strong disapproval of the practice.” Martin Teitel, director of the Council for Responsible Genetics, told the San Jose Mercury News that pet cloning is “a terrible diversion of science to make money.”
They cite many reasons for opposition, including the fact the pet population is already out of control, research that indicates cloned animals have serious, often lethal internal defects; and, perhaps most significant, the fact a cloned pet will never be an exact duplicate of the beloved Fluffy or Spike — which is the notion that has captivated a lot of pet owners.
“I kind of weighed that before having my dog go through the procedure,” Clarke says. “Cc, I guess, looks totally different than the cat it was cloned from [a cat’s coat is determined by non-genetic factors during embryonic development]. I think that there are so many environmental factors. . . . I think there’s a great chance every pet will look different, and be different personality-wise. But I think it was the basic genetic makeup that I was looking to retain.”
A non-issue
But some pet owners don’t see it as an issue.
“I don’t believe these articles that it’s going to be a different personality,” says Chicago surgeon Robert Schenck, who, with his wife, Marcia, is the proud owner of Sir, a decidedly mixed-breed dog that they found nearly 14 years ago in Marion, Ind. They were so smitten by Sir that, as he grew older, they ran his picture in the Marion newspaper, seeking similar-looking dogs that might be related. The ad didn’t get a nibble, so a couple of years ago they had his cells stored in hopes that the Texas A&M program will someday be able to duplicate him. And they’re hoping for a close copy.
“You read stories about identical twins, how they marry similar people,” Schenck says. “Even if they’re raised separately, they come out just about the same. I suppose there is an environment that can modify certain reactions and that sort of thing, but I can’t take [a clone] back to Marion and have him live through [Sir’s] experience.
“I’m not worried about the personality. I think if we get that close, a genetic copy of him, that we’re going to have a very similar dog.”
“People say, `Well, it’s not going to be her, why do you want to do this?’ ” DeFord says of Sassy’s projected clone. “I know it’s not going to be her, but just knowing it was made from her has really helped.
“And like I’ve told people, I hope they have the process down before Sassy does go, so she can meet [her clone] and maybe the pup can pick up some of the little things that Sassy does. That’s really what I’m praying for.”
