The dread of dropping your favourite mug, while not the most crushing sentiment, is something that will have you down as you reach for the top of a now empty shelf at the start of your day. What do you do then? Simple: you buy a new one! But is the mug you're buying really “new”, or are we humans so wrung in our routines and so afraid of change that we would buy the same mug now marked up six times the price, and is that mug really the “same”? You may find yourself questioning the significance or triviality of the mug, but what if it WAS a crushing sentiment; what would you do if the mug was your pet?
Pet cloning is an up and coming phenomenon that is driving us in the first world to spark debates both practical and ethical; however, the prospect of having our furry friends back with us seems to completely override any reasoning either kind. If Barbara Streisand can clone her dog, why can’t you regain your rightful happiness- or to rephrase: pay about $32,000 to force around five separate animals to unwillingly give you what you want. Around five animals of the desired species are kept captive in what are essentially mills dubbed “scientific breeding centres” and their reproductive cells are replaced with your pet’s- which must be cryo-frozen before its loss for a fee of about $2000- and give a result with the same genetic coding as that of your original pet.
So yes, pet cloning “revives” your pets…or does it? You’re promised a pet with the same genome structure but the way it can be expressed through its environment or through the time you spent with it can never be replicated, and while the idea that you could get those memories back is purely immaterial, the return of cloning is not. Your pet may not even be the same colour, it likely won’t love the same, remember the same, or even behave the same. What pet cloning doesn’t give you your beloved back, it gives you a farce version of what it could’ve been under very different circumstances; simply put it is not the friend you once loved. In the words of Barbara herself,” you can clone the body, not the soul”.
You could get a new pet, start a new experience and learn to appreciate a new life while preserving the loving memory of what you had. But if you really want to spend a college fund, the freedom of five animals, and your acceptance of loss for an outcome where you get back what you lost only on a surface level, then at what point is your dog or cat more of a living friend than a material possession? Is your friendship so shallow that you could go to the store and buy it back? Is it a pen then, or just another mug?
Comments