This article is reprinted by permission from NextAvenue.org. The clock started ticking more than 20 years ago when the world said, “Hello, Dolly,” to the globe’s first cloned sheep. At that point, it was only a matter of time before producing genetic duplicates of all sorts of animals would become ho-hum.
That time has arrived for dogs, cats, and various other household pets (not to mention at least one wild ferret). For a tidy sum that would quickly close the deal on a brand-new car, a growing handful of companies will harvest DNA from your recently deceased (or living) fur baby and deliver a genetically identical critter in six months or so.
““You’re putting a lot of lab animals through medical procedures that are unnecessary, that are not of benefit to them, and can harm them,””
— Sharona Hoffman, professor of law and bioethics, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland
The laboratory part of this process is technically called somatic cell nu …