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In Britain, the Animal Procedures Committee
which advises the home office, says cloning for
such frivolous purposes should be banned. At
present, cloning a single cat would cost £7000,
but this could fall to £700. Dogs would be more
expensive because a bitch (surrogate mother) comes
on heat less often than a queen (unspayed cat) - a
cloned dog could cost £70,000, falling to £5,000.
The first feline clones will be part of
scientific research (probably laboratory animals),
but ultimately cloning could become available to
cat owners. Some American cat owners are already
having tissue samples from their cats stored ready
for commercial cloning. At present, the banking of
tissue samples for cloning costs approximately
$700 - $1000 plus $100 per year to keep the sample
in storage.
No-one yet knows how much commercial
cloning will cost, but price will fall once the
technology has been perfected and is more
reliable. At present cloning is costly since out
of 200 attempts, only one or two clones might be
born. Many eggs containing transplanted nuclei
simply fail to develop or develop in an abnormal
way and die in utero.
At first, cloning pets will be something only
wealthy owners can afford. If the process is
perfected, cloning could lead to mass-production
of genetically identical animals destined for far
less happy lives in experimental laboratories.
Cats are used as experimental subjects in a
number of laboratory and medical experiments.
Reducing the genetic variation between cats
removes many unknowns from experimental procedures
e.g. their reaction to drugs, disease or surgical
procedures. Cloning potentially gives researchers
the ability to create large numbers of genetically
identical cats. It would allow the mass-production
of kittens with genetic defects such as missing
enzymes or abnormal organs; a single genetically
defective kitten (which would not reach
reproductive age) born through random mutation
could give rise to a multitude of defective,
short-lived kittens destined purely for research.
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