People will do some strange things for the love of a pet. Just a few weeks ago The Chronicle reported on the relatively new practice of freeze drying pets. Weird.
But a recent article in People magazine was devoted to explaining cat cloning. Not cat cloning for the advent of science. That would be silly.
These people were cloning cats to bring back a part of a deceased feline friend for very rich people. People that maybe have a few screws loose. Losing a pet is awful. It’s the same discussion that took place with the freeze drying. But people! Let go!
Pets are wonderful creatures. Well, cats are expendable, but dogs are wonderful creatures! But their DNA is too complicated to replicate according to the scientists interviewed in People.
There isn’t a whole lot of good that can come from cloning. Especially cat cloning. It is unfathomable to think how much money was used to clone the first cat, named cc, short for carbon copy.
There are teachers, police officers and firefighters who get paid minimal salaries, if anything at all. But that’s OK, because America now is home to a cloned cat.
Also, people need to learn how to deal with death and dying. It’s not a lesson that is fun to learn, but it is necessary because people and animals do not live forever.
But by advertising the fact that cat cloning is around, people are paying exorbitant prices for a procedure that creates an identical cat, but not exactly the same cat.
That’s right folks, for just $200,000 you can have your very own cloned cat delivered straight to your doorstep!
Yuck. How “Pet Semetary” is that?
And who is to say the cloning will stop with cats? It won’t. That cloned sheep, Dolly, cost hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of dollars to create. And what is she doing right now? Hanging out with other sheep. That’s productive.
Now cc, the cloned cat, will just hang out at someone’s house acting like (gasp!) a normal cat.
Next will come dogs, then horses, then chimpanzees and then humans.
Scientists are already saying it is possible to clone a human, but thank the stars it hasn’t happened yet.
Cloning a whole human is an ethicist’s nightmare. There is absolutely no good that will come out of that.
The only thing that cloning is good for is medical benefits. For example, scientists have been telling the media for years that it is possible to clone certain parts of the body.
A human ear was grown on the back of a rat not too long ago, and cloning can possible help victims of accidents or disease by replacing their prosthetic limbs with cloned ones. But the world has enough unwanted children without creating more babies in a laboratory. One can see it now:
“Mommy, where did I come from?”
“Well, sweetheart, your daddy and I love each other very much and one day we decided to put all that love together and…….. clone some other person’s kid to get you.”
A world of cloned humans is not that far away, if scientists could get away with it. But before that happens- a world of cloned cats.