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Thursday, January 01, 2009

Remembrance of Pets Past and the metaphysical question of souls
Posted by Jill | 7:37 AM
Eight years ago we lost both our cats, Wendy and Oliver, within three weeks of each other. Ollie went first, on December 10, 2000. He was fifteen, and we had been treating him for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and congestive heart failure for a year before his kidneys gave out, perhaps partially due to the Lasix we'd been giving him to treat the congestive heart failure. He and Wendy had fought like crazy their entire lives. Wendy was a true cat -- haughty, aloof, intelligent, and did not suffer fools, or buffoons like Oliver, gladly. Ollie was always more like a dog. He was vocal, needy of attention, highly social and adaptable. Wendy always thought this was a huge betrayal of the cat ethos, and rarely missed a chance to swat him in the head to remind him that he wasn't supposed to be the way he was.

And yet, when he was gone, Wendy, who was also fifteen, became depressed. We had thought we'd give her a bit of time as an only cat, but that didn't seem to help her. She was like the wife in a dysfunctional marriage who couldn't live with him, but couldn't live without him either. So we set out to find a cat that wouldn't harass or threaten her, and brought Jenny home Christmas Eve day, where she promptly took up residence under a chair in our home office and didn't move from there, except to eat, for the next three months. But for all that Wendy wanted to be in the room with her, it didn't help, and by New Year's Day, she could barely move from her cat bed in front of the forced air vent to go get a drink of water. Her kidneys too were failing rapidly, and we lost her January 2nd, 2001.

The following weekend we went in search of our next cat and brought Maggie home. With Jenny huddled under the chair in a constant state of abject terror, it was imperative that we get a social cat. We wanted one that talked the way Ollie did, and who was playful like him and affectionate like him. And Maggie fit the bill perfectly.

As time went on, it became clear that history had repeated itself. The more Jenny came out of her shell, the less patience she had with Maggie, while Maggie proved so similar to Ollie that at times I felt he visited her in the dead of night to give her pointers. To this day, I can remember Wendy's haughtiness and condescension vividly, while Ollie is a haze, largely because Maggie is the piece that fit into that hole in the puzzle, so when I think of his personality, it's her that I see. But even more astonishingly, she and Jenny have the same relationship. They fight like our last generation of cats did, and while Jenny is a much sweeter cat than Wendy was, she was a stray for at least a year, and is one tough customer, and finds the relentless yowling for an hour and a half before mealtimes that Maggie does to be undignified. So every now and then she has to tackle Maggie, pin her to the ground, and bite at her a few times to remind her of what a cat is supposed to be.

When you're attached to your pets, losing them is devastating. I'm not sure how we ended up with history repeating itself. Perhaps it's simply a function of needing a more "catty" cat to be with Wendy in those last days, and then needing a more social cat to offset that. But whatever the reason, we have now had essentially the same two cats for the last 22 years; only the coloring has changed.

And we did it without cloning.

Today's New York Times profiles the owner of a biotech company who had his mother's dog cloned upon its death, and who in this article jumps through hoops to insist that the clones are just like the original dog:
When Mr. Hawthorne recalls Missy, he tends to wax eugenic. “She was an amazing dog: superior intellect, incredibly beautiful, obedient, a phenomenal temperament,” he said. “I especially loved her majestic plume of a tail.” And in the clones, as he put it matter-of-factly, “all those qualities are represented.”

As for some of the discrepancies, the clones vary in size and color, Mr. Hawthorne said, primarily because they were born months apart, and none are fully grown yet. “The dark part of their fur starts out reddish-black and gets blacker over time,” he said. “Except on the faces, which start out black and go white within the first year.”

[snip]

While he does acknowledge that when it comes to such highly trainable creatures as dogs, it’s pretty difficult to know where nature ends and nurture begins, he said that in the case of his dogs, the ambiguities have nothing on the essential Missy-ness of the clones.

“The girls love to run after each other,” he said pointing at the dogs in the distance. “You see the speed and athleticism? That’s part of what made me want to do this. There are dogs that are faster on a straightaway, but I’d never seen a dog make turns like this until Missy.”

Mr. Hawthorne sees himself as a cultivator of prodigious talent — from the clones to his team of scientists in South Korea to his 8-year-old son, Skye, who had accompanied him and the dogs on the hike. Skye is in third grade but is already studying high school algebra. Mr. Hawthorne brought along a notebook with a handful of quadratic-equation problems, in case his son got restless.

Last spring, Skye completed a science project, “Cloning Grandma’s Dog” that included a behavioral comparison chart. Among other findings, the study concluded that Mira shares Missy’s fondness for broccoli and “lots of snuggles” — both dogs scored five out of five points in these categories, in addition to the one for “likes long walks.” (“Most dogs do,” Skye noted under “comments.”) Two key matters of variance were “Jumps into cars” (“Clone still learning which car is ours”) and “Hates camera flash” (“Clone did not respond to standard flash”).

Ultimately, Skye determined that Mira looked a lot like Missy but that their behavior was only 77 percent similar. “But that was April,” Mr. Hawthorne said. “I think they’re a lot more similar now.”

LIVING with a clone, Mr. Hawthorne claims, is a lot like living with the original dog. “It’s totally as if I’ve got Missy in my house, once you get over the ‘wow’ factor,” he said. He and Mira and Skye inhabit a two-story “1950s futurist house” built into a hill in Mill Valley (Mr. Hawthorne is divorced and shares custody of his son with his ex-wife — “an excellent genetic donor, by the way,” he said of her). At night, he said, Mira “puts Skye to bed,” which means she walks with him to his room and ascends the stairs of his loft bed with him, waiting to be told “Good night” before she leaves. Mira is an outdoor dog, as Missy was, and sleeps on the front steps.

[snip]

nd who says goodnight to Mira’s fellow clone, MissyToo? Mr. Hawthorne gave her to his mother, Joan Hawthorne, who still misses the original Missy. But she has yet to take a liking to Missy’s progeny, and the dog has lived primarily with paid “handlers” in the Mill Valley pied-à-terre of her longtime companion, John Sperling.

“They’re not at all alike,” Ms. Hawthorne said of the old Missy and the new one. “In looks, they are a little bit, of course. But, I mean, the puppy is delicate and aggressive. Missy was robust and completely calm.” She added, “Missy wouldn’t come through my home and knock over every wineglass.”

Besides, she adopted another puppy not long after Missy died. “I already have a dog — a real dog.”


It seems to me that the traits about which Hawthorne waxes rhapsodic are a function of the breed mix of both the original dogs and the clone, and could be obtained just as easily by finding a similar border collie/husky mix at a shelter and raising it in the same way.

One of the more interesting implications of the idea that cloning re-creates the original dog is that it acknowledges the highly unscientific notion that animals have "souls", which can readily be reproduced along with its DNA traits. Those of us who have ever had a pet crawl into our laps at the precisely right moment when we need a hug know that while the idea of animals having souls may fly in the face of religion, it's far from a ridiculous notion. But the larger idea that souls, or personalities, can be reproduced in their entirety has implications for a future of human cloning in which parents who lose a child might be inclined to clone the dead child to "replace" him or her -- a chance to "do it all again". But if such things are possible, then what does it say about the uniqueness of the individual?

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Anonymous Anonymous said...
This raises lots of interesting questions. Is the personality in the brand of dog or cat, or is it in the particular dog or cat? Does Mr. Darcy, who looks just like your cat Ollie, have the same personality? Each individual has an energy imprint that we can identify. When we wake up in the morning and feel that our deceased relative is in the room with us, how do we know that it's that relative and not someone else? We can identify their energy imprint. This comes with the soul, not with the branding.

I suspect that a soul enters a cloned body the same way it enters a body forming in the womb, or in a test tube. It is at this level that the scientific and the metaphysical merge, and neither can be ignored IMHO!!
1/4/09, 2:59 PM  
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