A couple with an undying love for their pet dog has decided to clone their Labrador Retriever after it passed away from cancer.
As Alicia and David Tschirhart explained, they couldn’t imagine their lives without Marley the lab after the pooch succumbed to his disease.
According to the California couple, they wanted an exact copy of Marley because the pooch allegedly saved Alicia’s life when they crossed roads with a snake during a hike.
“I just saw this really big stick and so I was focused on grabbing that. I didn’t even see the snake until Marley started clawing,” she said.
And so, the couple resorted to ViaGen, a US cloning company that allows pet owners to create genetic copies of their beloved companions for nearly $50,000 per procedure.
As David added, the couple is excited for their children to grow up around Ziggy who is an identical copy of Marley.
“I just couldn’t think of any better way to do that. To have, you know, their years growing up to have Ziggy around,” he said in an interview with KUSI.
“They have the same personality, they play the same, they favor the same toys,” Alicia said as she spoke about their new dog.
While plenty of people defend the idea of pet cloning, the controversial practice has been slammed as “needless” and “destructive” by animal rights organizations.
“Animal cloning is a destructive, needless and often frivolous enterprise. Cloning is a highly experimental procedure, with an enormous number of failures,” The Humane Society of the United States insisted.
“Most cloned animals die in gestation or at birth. The relatively few survivors often suffer physical abnormalities, severe and chronic pain and other serious conditions.
“Cloning experiments reflect a spirit common to all systematic forms of cruelty to animals. Such experiments reveal a recklessness and hubris, rejecting the prior claims of nature and the inherent dignity of animal life. They treat animals as commodities alone, instead of as living individuals with needs and natures of their own.”
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Replaced!