Re-Pet a Reality

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Posted by michael on Thursday December 23, 2004 @05:08AM from the double-your-pleasure dept.

tigerdarklord writes "The Sci-Fi concept of pet cloning has become a commercial venture. Genetic Savings & Clone now not only offers genebanking for your pet (alive or recently dead), but a full service cloning shop. Although they started by producing two clones of the CEO's cat, they have now produced their first commercial clone for a woman from Texas. GSC has modified their cloning procedure to overcome the resemblance issues demonstrated when the College of Veterinary Medicine, Texas A&M, created CopyCat. The technology looks promising but the $50,000 price tag will prove to place the service out of the reach of most pet owners."

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More money than brains I guess by grub · 2004-12-23 05:11 · Score: 5, Insightful

The technology looks promising but the $50,000 price tag will prove to place the service out of the reach of most pet owners.

... and they get a pet that looks like their deceased pet yet isn't. "Mittens 2.0 scratches my furniture, Mittens 1.0 didn't."
If these people really loved animals and would quit trying to relive the past with a facsimile-pet the $50K (or less) would be better used if donated to a pet shelter for food and sterilization programs. And while they're there they could take home an animal currently on death row.

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1. Re:More money than brains I guess by rjstanford · 2004-12-23 05:21 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  If these people really loved animals and would quit trying to relive the past with a facsimile-pet the $50K (or less) would be better used if donated to a pet shelter for food and sterilization programs.
  
  Yeah, they could. Of course, people who loved animals could take the $3000 they spent on a new computer to replace their barely-a-year-old computer and donate it to a pet shelter as well. People spend money. The vast majority of it goes to things that other people think are "wasteful," at least in this country. The only thing that changes is the perspective.
  
  As to the wisdom of spending $50k on a cat - any cat - I'd say that it depends a lot on your overall financial picture.
  
  And as for cloning, well, that's another debate entirely. Two debates actually, one on the ethics of it and another one on the effectiveness. Ah, joy.
  
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2. Re:More money than brains I guess by Dr.+Evil · 2004-12-23 05:42 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  ...the $50K (or less) would be better used...
  The odd thing about money is that it follows a conservation principle... it's never destroyed, it just changes form.
  $50k was just liberated from somebody who didn't need it. Half of it went into taxes (on the operation, the materials for the operation, the salaries for the employees etc), the other half was distributed among those who performed the operation.
  You could argue that it was a $50k investment towards the practitioners of vetrenary science, which I'm sure bennefits the rest of society somehow.
  I have no problem with wealthy people spending money on frivilous things. It does bug me though when they spend it on things which hurt everyone else... like gas-guzzling cars, old growth wood, clothes made from slave labour, stuff like that.
  IMHO, the greater harm was done just by creating another cat rather than saving one from a shelter... the $50k is better liberated regardless of how or why... and the harm done isn't that big a deal.