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Investigative journalist John Woestendiek’s Dog, Inc. makes up for its sloppy writing by revealing the dark side of cloning our furry friends

SNUPPY, the world’s first canine clone, celebrated his first birthday on 24 April 2006 with sausage and ice cream. People brought him flowers and wrapped him in a South Korean flag, yet the mood was hardly festive in the lab at Seoul National University where he was born and raised. Snuppy’s creator, geneticist Woo Suk Hwang, had just been fired by SNU for falsely claiming to have cloned human embryos. Charged with fraud, Hwang plummeted from a national symbol to a prospective criminal.

Given his dogged determination and dubious ethics, not to mention his self-destructive pride, Hwang is an apt father figure for dog cloning. As investigative journalist John Woestendiek documents in Dog, Inc., the story of Snuppy and company is anything but cuddly.

Motivated by a mixture of patriotism and profit, dependant on the wholesale harvesting of eggs, and prone to producing sickly mutants, South Korea’s dog cloning industry has largely evaded international scrutiny – a disturbing state of affairs given its monumental implications. “The cloning of dog,” Woestendiek writes, “has brought us a step closer to what much of the world fears – human cloning – and it did so not just by advancing the science but by advancing the social acceptance of clones.”

Nevertheless, Woestendiek says, dog cloning was practically inevitable. In the century that cloning has advanced from sea urchins and salamanders to Dolly the sheep, dogs have come indoors to be coddled like children. They have increasingly been outfitted with technological enhancements, from flea collars to pacemakers. Woestendiek is rightly dubious that these heroics are altruistic, arguing that artificially lengthening dogs’ lives has less to do with their well-being than with our attachment to them.

That the first dog was cloned in South Korea, a country where canines are on the menu, may at first seem surprising. Snuppy was not cloned as a pet, and has seldom been outside his cage. The dogs that provided the eggs and DNA to produce Snuppy were mostly drawn from the vast population of “farm mutts” that supply restaurants with dog meat.

But this unsentimental environment was crucial to cloning success, Woestendiek argues. Given that dogs go into oestrus only a few times a year, and that they are exceedingly difficult to clone owing to their opaque eggs, success depended on a vast canine population and minimal ethical oversight.

What’s more, Hwang and his colleagues were motivated by the chance to show off South Korean scientific prowess. While early cloning milestones, including the birth of Dolly, had been achieved in the UK and US, western countries had all but given up on cloning dogs, unable to access enough eggs. Cloning Snuppy meant beating westerners at their own game. Plus there was money to be made selling cloning services to fanatical dog owners, especially Americans, at upwards of $100,000 a pup.

“Westerners had all but given up on dogs. Cloning Snuppy meant beating them at their own game”

Still, Woestendiek takes care not to condemn dog cloning altogether, noting that SNU has made advances in scientific research, particularly with the production of transgenic beagles. Six of them were born in 2007 – all named Ruppy – with a gene that glows red under ultraviolet light. “The glowing dogs show that it is possible during cloning to insert genes with a specific trait,” Woestendiek writes, “allowing the researchers to proceed with plans to clone dogs with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes and other diseases.” Why dogs are desirable as a research platform, especially given their difficulty to clone, is never explained.

Dog, Inc. is a flawed book, with a muddled structure and sloppy writing. But these faults are offset by Woestendiek’s investigative skills, and his recognition that dog cloning concerns more than just canines. Snuppy is at once a political animal and a creature of our technological culture.