The advent of domestic animal cloning has created a new, disturbing trend among pet owners – if one dares call them that.
They’re using this expensive process to never have to say goodbye to Fluffy or Petunia. The promise of eternal life, or something like it for a beloved pet, is viewed as worth the cost to these owners – even as it ignores the plight of numerous shelter animals and the fact that a clone is nothing more than a DNA copy that can never truly be the original.
It’s better to adopt an animal and save a life than clone a friend just to end up with a familiar looking stranger in the house.
The newly offered service by companies such as Genetics Savings and Clone disregard the fact that there are millions of homeless animals in the United States and that every animal that is cloned for companionship means at least one non-clone cat or dog will be euthanized.
Without stringent spay and neuter laws, there is an overpopulation of these animals and cloning only furthers this.
The wish to re-create Socks and Rover through genetics is not only selfish but also ultimately cruel.
Adoptions decrease and animals die in lab tests to perfect cloning methods, and if cloned pets do not live up to the buyer’s expectations, they too will be discarded.
A big issue is people mistakenly believing that cloned pets are exact replicas of the original, which is not true.
Cloned animals can look different and have vastly different personalities than from their “mothers” and may even develop medical problems due to the cloning procedures, according to studies done at the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research.
People considering pet cloning to soften the grieving process should consider adopting a homeless animal that needs love.
The result is the same, but the cost is a great deal less and is truly life-saving.

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