LAST summer, Tigger鈥攐ur neighbour鈥檚 cat鈥攍earned how to hurl
himself from the roof of the adjacent library through the open window of our
first-floor kitchen. After the initial surprise, we quickly adjusted to life
with an occasional cat. I never much liked cats before, but I have become rather
smitten with Tigger.
If the neighbours moved house, which they regularly threaten to do, we would
lose a dear friend. Which is why I have become fascinated with the idea of
cloning pets. A team at Texas A&M University in College Station is trying to
clone Missy, the dog of a Silicon Valley billionaire known only as Mr E
(快猫短视频, 19 December 1998, p 28).
He is apparently so besotted with Missy
that he is investing millions of dollars in a genetically identical replacement.
Once this pioneering experiment is complete, other pet owners will be able to do
the same for considerably less money, the scientists claim. They believe this
may be the most immediately profitable form of cloning, and I think they may be
right.
So, in a more technologically advanced world, were Tigger鈥檚 owners ever to
move, we could simply FedEx a cheque and a few cells鈥攑erhaps just a
whisker鈥攖o a clone-a-cat laboratory and in a few months receive a sweet
little Tiggoid kitten in return. Would this cat be as enchanting? Who knows? But
finding out would be fun in a way most nature/nurture conflicts aren鈥檛. People
could bring up the 鈥渟ame鈥� pet under the same conditions again and again, or they
could raise it in different environments. As my wife Nancy points out, cloning
would remove the need for those newfangled pet passports. People would just have
different copies of their pets in different countries. (Before anyone writes in
to complain, she doesn鈥檛 mean it.)
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However, simply cloning Tigger would not be good enough, because Nancy is
allergic to him and his visits have to be rationed. So ideally I鈥檇 like to snip
out the allergen-encoding genes from Tigger鈥檚 genome. This may turn out to be
impractical鈥攁llergen production is probably too closely tied up with
Tigger鈥檚 cat-ness for the two to be disentangled鈥攂ut as an idea, it鈥檚 a
winner.
Since humans have more in common with cats than cauliflowers, you might
expect that the unease people feel about agricultural biotechnology would be
nothing compared with the revulsion such Frankentiggers would engender. But I
suspect the reverse is true. One of the problems with cloning and genetic
modification is that the technology is associated with mass production and
conformity, with identikit herds and monoculture cereals. Cloning and tweaking a
pet would be all about individualisation. It would prize personality above
everything. And there would be less of a sense of the unnatural. Pets, after
all, are not natural鈥攖hey have been bred and trained to be part of the
human world. If you had to draw a distinction between 鈥渦s鈥� and 鈥渘ature鈥�, pets
would be with us.
Biotechnology forces us to rethink our attitudes to the natural and the
artificial. In the context of the countryside, people might find this difficult,
even without the health worries associated with GM food. But in the context of
the cat on their mat, it may be not so hard at all. Especially if the cat is as
unnaturally charming as Tigger.