Pet cloning misses point.

Byline: Karen McCowan / The Register-Guard

SUPPOSEDLY, I am just the sort of pet owner the folks at Genetic Savings & Clone believe their "scientific breakthrough" will appeal to.

As I read the front page story on their successful use of cloning to "reproduce beloved pets," my own beloved dog, Snowball, snoozes at my feet, basking in a window-shaped patch of sun.

It seems that Genetic Savings & Clone - why give your company a name evoking the savings and loan debacle? - has poured $3.7 million into a research project at Texas A&M, which has successfully cloned a cat.

When I rattle my newspaper to turn to the second half of the story on an inside page, Snowball startles and opens her eyes, fixing a steady, trusting gaze on my face.

The morning sun illuminates the bluish cataract sheen that's increasingly apparent in her sweet brown eyes. Feeling a familiar little stab of distress at what that bodes, I reach down to stroke her still-silky black head.

Snowball is 13 - an old lady of 91 in dog years.

At her recent checkup, the vet proclaimed her a "young 13," but we know her good days are numbered.

It's not just the cloudy eyes, but the fact that she no longer does her "faster! faster! faster!" straining at the leash when we take her for a run. (In her prime, she once ran beside my bicycle, full tilt, the entire seven miles to my grandmother's house in Springfield.)

It's the fact she now sometimes opts to merely bark at passing deer, rather than act on her persistent, deluded belief that she could actually catch one.

When you've loved a pet this long, there's a disbelief of the speed of time passing that's akin to the "Turn around and you're tiny, turn around and you're grown," sensation of raising a child.

Wasn't it just yesterday that this tiny, feisty runt of the litter picked us by scampering up to my husband's and my outstretched hands and nipping playfully at our fingers?

Wasn't it just last week when she bounded into our Arizona back yard with a Christmas ribbon around her neck, triggering shrieks of delight from two little girls sure mom and dad would never relent and get them a dog?

What I wouldn't give to turn back the clock and have those years all over again!

GENETIC SAVINGS and other cloning companies are apparently banking on sentiments like mine translating into a willingness to pay big bucks to hit their virtual "rewind" button and replicate beloved pets.

"Sit in an airplane sometime and talk to people whose Fluffy has cancer or whose Fluffy just died," Betsy Dresser told The Wall Street Journal in a story headlined, "Only Nine Lives for Kitty? Not If She Is Cloned."

"This is the way to revive the pet in their minds," said Dresser, who leads a cat-cloning research project at the Audubon Nature Institute.

Meeting my dog's gaze, however, I can't imagine a more offensive idea.

It presumes matter over mind, style over substance.

It suggests that a cute little doggy body, a particular shape of face, is all there is to my dog.

In fact, it's her life experience that makes her who she is.

It's our shared history that makes her mean what she means to me.

Yes, I could again hold in my arms another warm, soft little puppy that looks much like her - a cocker-Lab mix.

(The cloned A&M kitty, Cc, is no exact replica of her genetic parent, in part because coat color is determined by the unique way color-containing cells develop in the embryo stage.)

But that puppy wouldn't become Snowball, for instance, unless she was deathly afraid of water - a trait Snowball developed when, as a puppy, she was barking at an air conditioning repairman on the roof and accidently backed into the swimming pool.

A trait reinforced when, en route to a campground in the Arizona mountains, we had to stop and wash her off with a car wash pressure hose after our carsick youngest child upchucked on Snowball's head.

Not only would the most faithful physical reproduction fail to capture such essence, it would also make me absolutely unfaithful to the memory of this unique creature who has so enriched my life.

Never mind that the Humane Society of the United States opposes pet cloning because some cloned animals suffer severe medical problems and because the practice "serves no compelling purpose and adds to our pet overpopulation problem."

My main objection can be summarized in the words of Dr. Duane Kraemer, a veterinarian and member of the A&M research team: "We've been trying to tell people that cloning is reproduction, not resurrection."