What science can tell us about our relationship with pets and our desire to clone them
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sunday magazine23:29What science can tell us about our pets – from keeping them to cloning them
Chances are you or someone you know proudly identifies as a “pet parent.”
And this is no surprise. As the Canadian Animal Health Institute (CAHI) has found, pet ownership rates in Canada are among the highest in the world.
According to data compiled by the federal government, More than 12 million Canadian households had at least one cat or dog In 2024. Cats and dogs are the most popular animal companions, with populations of 8.9 million and 8.3 million respectively.
Canadians also keep millions of birds, fish and reptiles as pets.
Research has shown that owning a pet has positive effects on people’s health and well-being, but Jay Ingram, author pet sciencesay those benefits cannot fully account for humans’ powerful desire to connect with the natural world.
When asked why humans keep pets, Ingram says there are many opinions, but no definitive answer. One theory he points to is that of the prominent evolutionary biologist, Edward O. Wilson’s “biophilia” hypothesis. Wilson, who died in 2021, argued that humans’ natural affinity for other living things is the essence of our humanity and binds us to all other living species.
Our desire to strengthen human-animal relationships has driven science to clone animals and find ways to understand their communication patterns. Talked to science writer and broadcaster sunday magazine Guest host David Komen about those efforts. Here is an excerpt from their conversation.
Celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Tom Brady (who has invested in the biotechnology and genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences) have cloned pets. This is a relatively modern phenomenon but does it happen often?
This happens more than people think. I quote a scientific paper in the book, “Insights from a Thousand Cloned Dogs,” but that was published several years ago, so you can imagine that there are probably thousands of cloned dogs now.
The thing about cloning is that it involves a misunderstanding of what you’re actually going to get. People expect the clone to be identical in every respect, but that is not going to happen. Anyone who knows a pair of identical human twins knows that, with very rare exceptions, they are not alike at all. Not in their behavior, not even in their looks. There are a lot of genetic influences that come from inheriting the genes you are born with; Same thing with the cloned dog. Barbra Streisand found that out because she wanted a specific type of curl on her cloned dog’s fur but she got three dogs and none of them had it. So, this expectation of identity is wrong.
Cloning began in the 1960s, is not as sophisticated as it is now or is likely to be in the future, but what is the goal? What are scientists trying to learn?
I would say that nowadays it has become not a scientific enterprise but an economic enterprise. Entire teams of polo horses have been cloned. You get a wonderful horse… a wonderful polo horse, and they tried to clone that horse as many times as possible so that they could get replacement horses that were physically, at least, equal to the original. It occurs in agriculture, it is widespread but it is usually for economic purpose. I’m not convinced that dog or cat cloning is going to become something that is routinely used to create replacement pets.
In our times of need, pets are there to respond when we are sad or angry. They know when we are grieving in some way, especially dogs and cats. It makes us wonder what our pets know. How open is the scientific community to animal sentience?
I think there is a lot of openness in feelings. If you asked me, “How much do we know about what goes on in the mind of a dog or a cat or any animal for which one can feel pity or love,” it is not very well known. I think there’s an opportunity, especially with AI, to start understanding in more detail what cats and dogs might be thinking, but we’re a long way from that.
london morning6:19If your dog could send you messages, what do you think he would say?
While most pet owners would love to have two-way conversations with their furry friends, one London dog owner gets messages from his dog. Meg Jarvis tells CBC’s Kendra Seguin how she taught her dog Ruby to send messages with the help of a message board.
In the case of wild animals, progress is being made more rapidly because wild animals are not contaminated by the thinking of a pet owner. Scientists, say, are able to watch the clicks of sperm whales and begin to see patterns that no one suspected, but they are not importing their own emotional feelings onto that data. Whereas, if you are talking to a dog owner who is convinced that their dog will feel or show guilt if they steal an item. That idea has been completely refuted by proving that the dog is expressing something that the owner defines as an offense in response to the owner scolding or looking at the dog critically. As far as anyone has been able to determine, the dog does not spontaneously feel guilty.
There is a man in Arizona who has identified 30 different prairie dogs. A prairie dog can tell that “there’s a guy in red over there” because they need different animals and colors. I think that’s where progress is going to happen. I fear that the human element in pet ownership is actually a barrier to learning what’s going on in their minds. And of course, there’s always the possibility that the way they think is so different from the way we think that we may never understand it.
