Five Cloned Puppy "Miracles"

Many people get attached to their pets, and Bernann McKinney isn't an exception. Afterall, her pitbull Booger saved her from one of Bernann's dogs when it had an aversion to it's medication. After the brutal attack, Bernann's hands were severly injured and she was forced to wear braces for a long period of time, in which Booger acted like a service dog.

He became my service dog,” Bernann said. “I was in a wheelchair, and my arms were in braces for a long time — I couldn’t use my hands. He could unlock a door with his teeth, he could answer the phone, he could do the laundry. He was my hands.”

After he passed away from cancer in April 2006, Bernann kept some DNA of Booger in hope of creating a clone of her beloved dog. She had heard of a dog that was successfully cloned in South Korea, and started to read up on the process. When she heard of a company in the US that could make cloned animals, she contacted them, but they shut down soon after. McKinney then contacted Korean scientist Lee Byeong-cheon with the biotech firm RNL Bio. She sent Booger's DNA to South Korea, and the entire cloning process caused her to sell her home in order to get the $50,000 needed, which was a discount price of the original $150,000.

Many people frown upon the idea of cloning, seeing it as unethical and harmful to the animals that are used in the process, and that a cloned animal doesn't live as long as a naturally born one. For example, 11 years ago a sheep named Dolly was cloned, but she only lived to be 6 years old. But Bernann has some legit points about the cloning process :

“Actually, the cloning process isn’t much different than in vitro fertilization. Basically, DNA is taken out and the DNA is inserted into a surrogate mother dog, who then has the babies very normally.”

Now, Bernann McKinney is a happy woman, who instead of getting just one Booger back, but five. And all of this happened when she found Booger as a stray 12 years earlier.

What do you think? Is cloning animals helpful to the human race, or not? Would it change your mind if a certain animal was severly endangered and was cloned to create more of it's species? More about the puppies here.