Would You Clone Your Dog Or Cat? Some Singapore Pet Owners Have ...

SINGAPORE: Travelling between Sydney and Gold Coast in Australia years ago, vet Jean-Paul Ly and his children stopped at a restaurant for a meal. A farmer walked in with two cattle dog puppies.

Ly’s children cuddled the dogs and asked their father if they could have them. The family could take only one, and Ly chose the blue cattle dog.

Eight-week-old Khan quickly showed it was fearless and intelligent. On the third day at its new home in Gold Coast, it went missing. The children walked along the nearby river, calling its name. When they returned home, they found it standing by the door, Ly recounted.

Khan was also a source of comfort when Ly was at his lowest. “He’d sit there and look at you. And when he’d look at you, it was like he understood,” said Ly. “When I was sad, he’d come up and nuzzle up against me.

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“When he died, a piece of me died with him.”

Seven to eight months before Khan died at the age of 17, Ly took the dog’s skin cells and had the sample frozen.

After its death in August, he decided to try cloning Khan at an overseas facility: Sinogene, a Chinese company that made the headlines in 2019 when it produced China’s first cloned cat. The price tag for cloning at the Beijing facility: About US$50,000 (S$68,500).

If successful, Khan’s clone might be the first such pet to be imported into Singapore.