The real cost of dog cloning
Meat market surrogates, horrific birth defects, and unwanted dupes. What does it really take to clone the perfect puppy?
I didn’t seek out Paris in Love. It found me. Like a lost puppy, it wandered on to my screen and begged for my attention until I relented.
I was stoned and had just finished the season finale of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. I was caught up on all of my regulars and at a loss for what to watch next. As a reward for reaching the end of the Bravo universe, the benevolent Peacock algorithm delivered unto me the straight-to-streaming return of America’s favorite celebutante: Paris Hilton.
Her signature sultry baby falsetto beckoned me back like a millennial siren in velour sweatpants. The nostalgia and THC were too strong. I couldn’t resist, so I gave in.
I don’t know what I expected to see, but it definitely was not a pair of cloned teacup chihuahuas named Diamond and Baby. Hilton’s second act (or is it her third?) isn’t nearly as provocative or irreverent as her first. She’s 43 years old now. She’s a mother, a business woman, and an advocate for minors who fall victim to the so-called “troubled teen” industry. She’s a bit more polished, vulnerable, and mature but no less chaotic.
Paris in Love Season 2 opens with our heroine juggling a move to a new mansion, IVF treatment, a perfume launch, a secret surrogate, a strained relationship with her mother, and the loss of her prized pet. The confluence of all of the above finds Paris running a burgeoning fashion brand out of a half-packed house while anticipating the birth of her first child, Phoenix Barron, who at the time was gestating in an another woman’s womb.
It appears pet cloning has lost its ick factor.
It becomes clear that Paris has taken on too much when, in the midst of a photo shoot for her new tracksuit label, she realizes her beloved chihuahua, Diamond Baby, has gone missing. “I will fucking lose my mind if she’s gone,” Hilton moans as she frantically runs through the halls of her mansion, dodging floor-to-ceiling moving boxes, while teetering on glittery silver stilettos. “That would be like me losing my daughter and my best friend.”
By the end of the episode the Diamond Baby story line is wrapped up with a cute, little dystopian bow. While taking a breather from their mother Kathy’s famous Christmas party, Paris tells her sister, Nicky Hilton Rothschild, that she’s had her sweet Diamond Baby cloned. Nicky admits that she finds the situation “a little strange” but “very on-brand” for her grieving sister.
In a later episode, Paris reveals the resulting twin clones, Diamond and Baby, to her mother who seems appropriately startled—at first. Kathy’s shock quickly fades as the unbearable cuteness of the puppies takes hold. The fact that these little fur balls are genetic duplicates of their namesake doesn’t seem to register or really matter. Their baby soft, two-toned fur, their big doe eyes, that sweet puppy breath; they are the picture of precious perfection, but there’s a darkness in their being that cuteness can’t cover up.
What’s most shocking about the rebirth of Diamond Baby is that it isn’t more shocking. It’s been just six years since Barbara Streisand casually admitted to Variety that she cloned her deceased, straight-haired coton de tulear, Sammie. That got people talking. Paris Hilton’s reality TV subplot, by contrast, felt like just that—another quirky turn in the sometimes unbelievable, very public life of a Beverly Hills socialite. The media coverage was scant. Diamond Baby’s second coming was a non-story outside of a handful of gossip blogs.
It appears pet cloning has lost its ick factor. But, no matter how much the practice has grown in popularity, it’s still a very complex, pricey, and, by some accounts, barbaric procedure.
Back in 2018, when Streisand’s Sammie situation was still courting controversy, The Washington Post published an interview with the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Woestendiek. The writer’s 2010 book Dog, Inc tells the sometimes disturbing history of canine cloning.
… Hundreds of dogs, many sourced from Korean meat farms, were employed in the cloning of Snuppy the “miracle” puppy.
According to Woestendiek, the quest to clone dogs started with a Texas A&M initiative funded by University of Phoenix founder John Sperling, who had ambitions of duplicating his girlfriend’s fur baby. Following multiple failed attempts and some success with other species, the effort folded. A team of South Korean researchers at Seoul National University soon picked up where the Texans left off and became the first to successfully clone a canine in 2008.
Time would later refer to Snuppy the Afghan hound as "a miracle of science in itself,” but this wasn’t an immaculate conception. According to Woestendiek, hundreds of dogs, many sourced from Korean meat farms, were employed in the cloning of Snuppy the “miracle” puppy.
“In creating Snuppy, the first canine clone, Korean scientists extracted eggs surgically from about 115 female dogs; after merging, the embryos were implanted into 120 more female dogs who served as surrogates. Many of those were aborted along the way for study,” Woestendiek told The Washington Post. He went on to note that the egg donors and surrogates, who all underwent extensive hormone therapy and invasive surgery, were later returned to the farms they came from to be sold for meat.
It’s no longer necessary to use so many other dogs to produce one clone, and the practice of procuring surrogates from meat farms has apparently ended, but the procedure still depends on the forced labor and potential suffering of countless animals. Then there are the mutations.
“In announcing the shutting down of BioArts … the company’s president cited a clone who was supposed to be black and white being born ‘greenish-yellow,’ dogs born with skeletal malformations and one clone of a male dog who was born with both male and female sex organs,” Woestendiek told The Post.
Even if all of the puppies come out relatively healthy and physically identical, there’s always the risk of a big litter and a bunch of unwanted dupes. Barbara Streisand’s dog Sammie produced four puppies. One died soon after birth. Streisand gave away another, as well as a Maltipoo she rescued in the wake of Sammie’s death. She kept clones Scarlett and Violet, and an apparent “distant cousin” of Sammie’s named Fanny—a perfect set of three rare, straight-haired coton de tulears fit for a queen.
6 million pets enter animal shelters every year. More than 900,000 are euthanized.
The ASPCA estimates that 6 million pets enter animal shelters every year. More than 900,000 are euthanized. Despite all of the abandoned cats and dogs in the world, apparent animal lovers with cash to burn still turn to breeders, and now commercial cloning companies, for that perfect companion.
In the early days of commercial pet cloning, it cost $150,000 to reproduce your dog. The price has since dropped significantly. Viagen, the US company that Paris Hilton used to clone Diamond Baby, charges $50,000 for replicating either a cat or dog and $85,000 for a horse. Since Snuppy, scientists have successfully cloned an estimated 1,500-plus canines and countless other animals from 22 different species. Advocates argue that cloning technology could be used to bring endangered species back from the brink of extinction, create genetically optimized service animals, and aid in the study of hereditary diseases.
Still, with all of the abandoned animals suffering in shelters today, the cloning of pets for the emotional fulfillment of the rich and famous hardly seems like a worthy endeavor. For Woestendiek and other critics, the procedure isn’t just an act of animal cruelty, it’s also a gateway to something potentially more horrifying: lab-grown people.
“Nearly all the futuristic concerns that have been raised about human cloning—those worst-case scenarios put forth by bioethicists and science fiction writers alike—surfaced in the joint corporate-collegiate quest to clone dogs and market them,” Woestendiek warns in Dogs Inc.
Advances in animal cloning, artificial wombs, and myriad other reproductive technologies are like dystopian puzzle pieces. Separately, they appear as beneficial steps forward in the fight against infertility and aging, but once combined they reveal a potentially dark future that looks like something straight out of A Brave New World.
Transhumanists see genetically optimized human clones as the future of reproduction, a sort of link in the chain connecting us to our posthuman future. Detractors believe genetic engineering could lead to state-funded eugenics, ethnic cleansing, and the end of human diversity.
Diamond and Baby are cute. Like, uncontrollably cute. If I saw them IRL, I might actually melt, but behind those puppy dog eyes lies a history of forced labor, horrific birth defects, and the lost opportunity to save at least two more pets from abandonment and potential execution.
As Paris has taught us countless times before: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Nightmare inducing