What science can tell us about our relationship to pets and our desire to clone them

Chances are, you or someone you know proudly calls themselves a “pet parent.”

And this is not surprising. Canada has one of the highest rates of pet ownership in the world, the Canadian Animal Health Institute (CAHI) has found.

According to the federal government, More than 12 million Canadian households owned at least one cat or dog. in 2024. Cats and dogs are the most popular companion animals, 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 a positive effect on people's health and well-being, but Jay Ingram, author of the book Pet Sciencesays these benefits don't fully explain people's strong desire to connect with the natural world.

When asked why people get pets, Ingram says that there are many opinions, but there is no clear answer. One theory he points to is the “biophilia” hypothesis of the eminent evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson. Wilson, who died in 2021, argued that humans' natural affinity with other living things is the essence of our humanity and connects us to all other living species.

Our desire to build stronger bonds between humans and animals has pushed science to find ways to clone animals and decipher their communication patterns. The science writer and TV presenter spoke to Sunday Magazine guest host David Common on the effort. Here is an excerpt from their conversation.

Celebrities like Paris Hilton and Tom Brady. [who’s invested in Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology and genetic engineering company] cloned domestic animals. This is a relatively modern phenomenon, but does it happen often?

This happens much more often than people think. I quote a scientific article in the book: “[Insights from] a thousand cloned dogs,” but this was published several years ago, so you can imagine that there are probably thousands of cloned dogs out there now.

The thing about cloning is that it involves misunderstanding what you're actually going to get. People expect a clone to be identical in every way, but that simply won't happen. Anyone who knows a pair of identical human twins knows that, with very rare exceptions, they are not identical at all. Not in their behavior, not even in their appearance. Once you receive the set of genes you were born with, there are many genetic influences that occur; the same goes for a cloned dog. Barbra Streisand discovered this because she wanted a special curl in her cloned dog's fur, but she had three dogs and none of them had it. So the expectation of identity is wrong.

Cloning began in the 1960s and was not as complex as it is now or likely to be in the future, but what is the purpose? What were scientists trying to find out?

I would say that now this is not so much a scientific enterprise as an economic one. Entire teams of polo horses have been cloned. You get one great horse…an amazing polo horse, and they tried to clone that horse as many times as they could to get replacement horses that were at least physically comparable to the original. This happens in agriculture, it is widespread, but usually for economic purposes. I'm not sure that cloning a dog or cat will be something that will be routinely used to create new pets.

During difficult times, pets always seem to be there, and when we feel sad or angry, they respond. They somehow know when we are grieving, especially dogs and cats. This makes us think about what our pets know. How open is the scientific community to studying animal feelings?

I think there is a greater openness to feeling. If you ask me, “How much do we know about what goes on in the mind of a dog, a cat, or any other animal for which we can feel compassion or love?”, it simply isn’t known enough. I think there is an opportunity, especially with the help of AI, to begin to understand in more detail what cats and dogs can think about, but we are a long way from there.

Progress on wildlife is achieved faster because the mindset of pet owners does not pollute wildlife. Scientists can look at, say, the clicks of sperm whales and begin to see patterns that no one suspected, but they don't bring their own emotional feelings to the data. What if you are talking to a dog owner who is convinced that his dog will feel or show guilt if he steals a treat. This idea was completely rejected, proving that the dog expresses what the owner defines as guilt in response to the owner reproaching the dog or looking at it critically. As far as we have been able to determine, the dog does not experience spontaneous feelings of guilt.

There's a guy in Arizona who has identified 30 different prairie dog calls. The prairie dog can say, “There's a man in red,” because he calls out different animals and colors. I think this is where progress will be made. I'm afraid that the human factor in pet ownership actually makes it difficult to truly know what's going on inside their heads. And of course, there is always the possibility that their way of thinking is so alien to our way of thinking that we will never understand it.