Pet cloning is the commercial cloning of a pet animal. The first, and so far only, successful commercially cloned pet was a cat named Little Nicky, sold to a north Texas woman for US$50,000.
Cloning creates only a genetic copy of an animal; it does not guarantee an identical personality, which may be formed more by life experiences than genetics. Many animal behaviorists believe that pet cloning will fail to produce pets with similar personalities to that of the parent, probably resulting in an eventual death of the commercial cloning business.
Controversy
In the United States, there are more than 2 million cats without owners , living in shelters or on the streets. In these settings, they are likely to be put down or die naturally if they do not find owners. This example of commercial cloning was decried by the Humane Society and other animal welfare groups, saying that the $50,000 cost of producing Little Nicky could have paid for the vaccination and care of a large number of currently homeless cats. By this same argument some groups denounce all breeding of domesticated pets - these pets cannot live in the wild, and there are more pets than there are willing owners, so for nearly every pet bred there is one which must be destroyed.
Furthermore, cloning attempts have high rates of failure, especially in the practice's infancy. Many kittens produced in the effort to clone Nicky did not survive, and Little Nicky was released to the owner only two months after his birth, to reduce the likelihood of releasing an unhealthy or doomed kitten. There is also no guarantee that Little Nicky will not suffer serious health problems in later life, as many cloned animals do.
Others defend the practice, arguing that commercial cat cloning reflects the will of the free market, and believing that this will encourage scientific innovation.
In the film The 6th Day, corporations that wanted to commercialize human cloning couldn't because it was banned. However, non-human cloning was still legal. Subsequently, they commercialized pet cloning (under the outlet name "RePet"), actually running the enterprise on a national scale at a commercial loss, in an effort to "soften up" the public's attitudes towards human cloning, while at the same time pushing for the ban on human reproductive cloning to be overturned.
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