Alice, again

Is cloning your pet a good idea?

I met my dog in the hallway the other evening. She looked up at me with cloudy eyes and a wonky smile because of the broken tooth. Her hearing is shot and you have to approach gently or it startles her. Still, she stands in the hallway and looks up and me and I know she’s thinking about how good a walk would be and all the smells outside.

That day I had read a magazine article about cloning. In the United States an industry has taking off and you can have your dog or cat cloned for $85,000. They’re cloning pets, race horses and prime beef cattle. There’s so much cloning that nobody keeps track of it any more. Clones don’t get on the news like Dolly the sheep did in the eighties, there’s too many of them. No more celebrity clones. They’re common as muck.

Standing there in the hallway looking at my dog Alice, I suddenly realised that if we had her cloned we’d start again and would get to know the young Alice, from the time before we owned her. When she was a puppy and a young dog. When she had a full set of shiny white teeth and a straight smile. Alice Again, this Alice‘s twin but born at a different time.

The original Alice and I are growing old together. We’re on practically the same medication. We’ve made our way through middle age and onwards as companions. Alice Again would seem like Alice out of time.

The article I read didn’t go into the territory of human cloning but if we can clone livestock we can surely clone ourselves and someone is undoubtedly thinking of doing so. An heir and a spare. Household staff. A spare child in case something terrible happens to the original. A source of spare parts for medical events. Could you take a tiny sliver of your child’s ear, freeze it and grow it in the event of something terrible happening? It would take a godlike hubris and a dismissal of all nature’s ways but we seem to manage that, as a species.

I don’t read dystopian fiction but all kinds of mind-bending possibilities exist when you start thinking about cloning. Somebody has probably turned them into fiction and published books about them. I can live without those stories. Reality already has enough mind-bending stories for me.

When I mentioned the cloning industry to my dad on the phone, his thoughts went straight to the risk of tyrants and dictators cloning themselves. Putin Again. Trump again. I suppose he’s right. You can see megalomaniacs thinking that going on forever in a perpetual round of repeats would be an obvious next step.

I look at Alice and think that cloning your pet would be living, breathing proof that we’re heading in the wrong direction.

I like the small stories I’ve made with Alice over the past few years. The fact that we only get one round makes them all the more precious. The smell of spring or autumn on the tree-lined path near our house. Her tail in the air, the white flag at the tip signalling happiness. Her two triumphant barks when running down a ball in the yard. The sound of her small, bare paws pounding the earth as she gallops down the side paddock. Her love of water, so much so that we thought she might be part seal.

Part collie, part seal

These days she alternates time outside with time soaking up the sun on a mat in the window, collapsed in the deep and sudden sleep of the aging.

But last night I looked out of my bedroom window and saw her gambolling alone across the back garden, tail in the air, nose up. If you want to see life lived to the full, get a dog.

Alice has been a fence jumper in her time and there’s nothing she likes more than road kill or skulking around on the neighbour’s property stealing his cattle dogs’ dinner. They’re a formidable pack, hard muscled and thug-like and I’ve heard them barking wildly as Alice drags their dinner beyond the reach of their chains, a little old lady getting the win.

Other times she gets out into the paddocks and finds wallabies the neighbour has shot and left there. She once gorged herself and threw it back up with such force in our backyard that she had what the vet called a ‘vasovagal episode’. The body is so busy throwing up that it stops feeding blood to the brain resulting in a massive drop of blood pressure. Alice staggered about the garden as if drunk and leaned hard against me when I crouched down. By the time we got to the vet’s it had passed and she had come good, ready for the next raiding adventure.

As Alice has gotten older she’s stopped jumping fences. Now she lies on the grass under the pepper-berry tree and gazes north towards the road where our son will appear in his Ute if he’s coming home. Dogs can recognise the smell of their family’s car from a couple of miles away. She can’t see it or hear it, but she knows when he’s on his way. My son is eighteen and spends most of his time at his girlfriend’s place now. Gone are the years when Alice would go up to his room at bedtime and lie on the carpet beside his bed, keeping guard while he went to sleep.

What would Alice think if we had her cloned and suddenly there was a duplicate running around? Would she like this new version of herself? How would they establish a pecking order? Would she ignore Alice Again like she ignores the cat?

I don’t think she would want a replicant running and I don’t reckon she thinks much about having her time over again either. It’s only we humans who go about bemoaning our mortality.

I suppose people think of cloning their pet because they’re frightened of the time when there’s more in the past than in the future and mostly what they have is memories. When we look at our dogs and watch them age, it reflects our own aging back at us. It reminds us that we will have cloudy eyes and leaky bladders if we haven’t got them already. It presents us with the unavoidable truth.

Our dogs also remind us of the simple joys of life and the importance of grabbing it with both hands or all four paws. She looks up at me in the hallway with her cloudy eyes and wonky smile and I know that I don’t need Alice Again. This Alice has already given me everything she’s got.

If you’ve enjoyed this, please subscribe - it’s free! And you might like to find my books on Amazon - just look for Apple Island Wife, and Saddleback Wife by Fiona Stocker.