The Amazing Adventures of Archibald Esq.
More Dogs Cloned
In December of last year (2006) the Associated Press reported on the case of another attempt at cloning dogs. A former colleague of disgraced South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk claimed that he had succeeded in cloning a female dog after last year’s breakthrough of creating the world’s first cloned male dog called Snuppy.
An Afghan hound, named Bona, was born on June 18 2006 using cloning technology, said Lee Byeong-chun, a veterinary professor of Seoul National University.
Two more of the same breed were born later. Byeong-chung said that DNA tests showed that the three female dogs are clones.
“This was a process that must be done to see if a cloned dog has reproduction capabilities,” Lee told The Associated Press.
Lee was a key member of Hwang’s research team, whose purported breakthroughs in creating human stem cells through cloning were found to be fake. Despite the fraud with human stem cells, the team’s success in cloning the world’s first dog, Snuppy, was confirmed.
The paper on cloning the female dogs appears on the Web site of Theriogenology — an International journal of animal reproduction.
While this story is not what is known in the trade as ‘breaking news’, it does give one a rather big bone to chew. Is the cloning of dogs to be praised? And why, awoooo?
The only advantage I can see is that cloned dogs will eventually be made available to medical research teams in the effort to ‘control’ scientifically for genetic differences when using dogs in medical research on new drug therapies, etc. Which boils down to the potential suffering of cloned dogs, does it not?
On the up side, the availability of cloned dogs would mean that your regular ‘let them breed’ type of dog would be safe from such use.
But on the down side, it just perpetuates a culture of suffering to animals for the potential sake of benefit to the two legged — which for those with their finger on the pulse of this type of debate would call ’speciesism.’ Hhmmmnnn…
And goodness knows speciesism rages wildly in this debate, as primates (monkeys and the like) are largely protected from invasive and potentially painful research, whilst rats, mice, cats and dogs are readily made available for ‘use’ (in the UK the primary choice of research dog is the beagle).
Do bark in with comments if you wish to chew over the matter further.
Awoof! Your roving and curious reporter — Archie
Posted 16 Jan 07
One Response to “More Dogs Cloned”
Leave a Reply
©2008 Roleta Archibald, Awoof!™
[…] If you’re a regular reader of these Newshound pages, you’ll know that two-leggeds have for a number of years had success in cloning canines – take Bono and Snuppy as the model examples. But now dog cloning is going commercial. A California dog-lover will pay $150,000 US dollars to have her dead pit bull cloned. […]
Archie - Dog tales - Dog Cloning Goes Commercial @ 9:15 pm, 22 February 2008