Man's best friend forever: cloning dogs for love and profit.

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Column

"ARE THEY all related?" a woman asks as she watches three puppies romp around Eastwood Park, a little slice of doggy heaven in Mill Valley, California. One of the pups, Mira, is notably larger than the other two, Chingu and Sarang, but they all share similar markings: white snouts and chests, darker fur on their backs and crowns.

"They're clones," Lou Hawthorne replies. The woman smiles as if Hawthorne's joking, but he's telling the truth; all three puppies were created at a commercial animal laboratory in Korea using tissue collected in the late 1990s from Missy, a beloved mixed breed that belonged to Hawthorne's mother and died in 2002.

Part collie, part husky, part who-knows-what, these rambunctious mutts are the most expensive pets on the planet, the end result of a 10-year project that has cost approximately $25 million. In May 2008, Hawthorne announced that his biotech firm, BioArts International, plans to offer five pet owners a chance to genetically Xerox their canine companions. Aspiring clone owners would participate in a series of online auctions, and the bidding would start at $100,000.

Not everyone was impressed. The Humane Society of the United States and the American Anti-Vivisection Society (AAVS) gave the disobedient bio-entrepreneur a stern swat in the form of a jointly issued report titled "Buyer Beware: Pet Cloning is NOT for Pet Lovers" Cloning foes characterize the practice as cruel, manipulative, and pointless, a domain of hucksters who exploit grieving pet widows and sell eternity by proxy through bad science and ostensibly immortal schnauzers.

"No one knows what goes on in these cloning labs," says Nina Mak, a research analyst at the AAVS. "No one knows how many animals are used and what happens to those animals. There's no assurance about the state of their welfare and their treatment and care. All of that happens without any oversight." Nell Trent, executive director of the Marin Humane Society, has called for "legislative intervention to regulate this dubious activity."

Is pet cloning really so strange and untenable? In addition to voicing concerns about animal welfare, those who oppose it take issue with its metaphorical implications. "This idea that you can take an animal and duplicate it whenever you want--it treats animals as objects that can be manufactured," says Mak.

But canine fabrication is not a new idea. There weren't any trendy "designer" hybrids like puggles or schnoodles on Noah's ark, nor even any...