Clone, Clone on the Range

Yet another report on the BBC breakfast news about a rich Florida couple who claim to have paid a South Korean company $150,000 to clone their pet Golden Labrador 'Lancelot' as 'Lancelot encore'. Stories of the 'first' commercially cloned pet seem to come around at regular intervals (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7246380.stm). They have a different dog/cat and different folk but there are similar dramatic costs. The first thing to note is that a cloned pet, although having the DNA of the original, will never be an exact copy (due to environmental influences, including the fact that the 'parent' animal is unlikely to have visited a Korean laboratory) of its template. This insistence on having the 'same' pet also seems a little weird as death is a fact of life (perhaps it's worth trying to learn to cope with this?) and how are your memories going to deal with having several sequential versions of the companion beast? Given the numbers of unwanted pets 'put down' annually by the RSPCA and its US equivalents, there goes appear to be masses of cheaper alternatives. There is also a suspicion (from 'Dolly' the sheep etc) that clones may not last very well. Having said all that, the Korean laboratory have clearly identified a massive potential market. I wonder though when we are going to have the first court case from a client who feels they were sold a pup.