Attack of the Clones?

I fully understand the love an owner (or parent, as some of us tend to view ourselves), and the sense of loss felt upon losing a pet. I would love to have Reese, Ebbie, Morgan or Ernie back, because they were great pets, and friends. At the same time, I feel that they had their place in time and in my life, and I would never seek to replicate them through the process of cloning. I love the two cats I have right now, and one of them, Frankie, is a flamepoint Siamese just like Ernie was. While I see similarities in character and behavior, I am under no illusion that Frankie is a replacement for Ernie.

To me, pet cloning is a emotionally cheap, fiscally irresponsible way for a pet owner to weaken their sense of loss. The clone will come into the world with the same genetic code as the deceased, but with be an entirely different individual aside from that. While DNA can help to mold parts of a personality, I believe that personal experience truly makes us who we are. The cat in the article, Spot, cannot be brought back through cloning. The Wolf's will get themselves another blue abyssinian through this process, but Spot is gone. Forever.

Issues of overpopulation and bioethics appear to be valid concerns, but the main thing I'm not buying in this article is the idea of the pets' "life force." Animals are like people, in more ways than most people appear willing or able to admit. A clone of this particular cat may or may not have the same disposition as the original. Just like people, pets are often shaped by the environment in which they are raised. Spot's "life force" lives on with his owners. Those owners, the Wolf's, owned Spot for 18 years... they are likely much different people today than they were nearly two decades ago (three, really, since the article was published in 2000), and any pet they get now, clone or not, would be emotionally sculpted in a way that reflects who they are now, rather than who they were when Spot was growing up.

I also enjoy the search for and discovery of a pet that will be a good fit in my home. In some cases, working with and training a new pet to be a better fit might be more rewarding than simply cloning someone you already know. I don't know how deep the cloning technology runs these days, but I can understand cloning from a business standpoint in terms of livestock, or a sickening militaristic standpoint if some government wanted to breed super soldiers or something... but when it comes to pets, I simply don't find cloning to be a legitimate use of our scientific knowledge.