WITHIN two years, Transgenic Pets of Syracuse, New York, plans to genetically
engineer cats so they won’t cause allergies in people. And the company is not
alone. Others have also been considering modifying pets to give them longer
lives, correct genetic defects or make them disease-resistant.
If they succeed, GM pets could soon be available from your local pet store.
For the first time, ordinary people will own transgenic animals—and grow
to love them. But others will look on such pets with uncertainty, suspicion or
even dread. So is genetically engineering animals a brilliant way of making both
pets and their owners healthier and happier? Or a threat not just to the welfare
of pets, but to their wild relations?
Advocates say using the latest biotech to improve cats and dogs shouldn’t
seem so strange. “People have been breeding qualities into these animals for
centuries,” says David Avner, the co-owner of Transgenic Pets. “We’re just
speeding up the process a little bit.” He says conventional breeding has failed
to rid cats of an allergen called “Fel d 1”
(New Scientist, 7 July, p12).
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Some projects are certainly well-intentioned. Philip Damiani, who directs the
companion animal and endangered species project at Advanced Cell Technology in
Massachusetts, wants to extend the life of working animals such as seeing-eye or
guide dogs. “It takes years to train them and establish a relationship, yet they
only live 9 to 10 years,” he says. “If we could double that, to the lifespan of
other breeds, that would be great.”
Other researchers point out that normal breeding itself has a lot to answer
for when it comes to animal welfare. Many breeds have health problems, such as
the blood diseases that plague Dobermans, or the back problems of Dachshunds.
Besides the sometimes harmful extremes of shape and size in dogs, consider the
tale of the Tennessee fainting goat. This animal has a natural mutation in a
muscle protein. When startled, the goat’s muscles seize up and it falls
over.
“It’s odd to think this breed survived as a pet because people made fun of
it,” says Carol Beck of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, whose team
found the gene behind the muscle defect. Humans with an equivalent mutation find
the muscle stiffness unpleasant, adds Beck. Yet the goats are still kept as
pets.
Far from making monsters of our pets, biotech could save them, say the
would-be genetic engineers. For instance, Charles Long of Texas-based Genetic
Savings & Clone (GSC) says his company is already hunting for the genes that
cause hip malformations in some breeds of large dog. In theory, any problems
bred into dogs or cats should be reversible if you tinker with the right
genes.
Of course, the work will also open the door to much more exotic and
questionable changes, such as non-shedding cats, more docile dogs and designer
coat colour. “I’m pretty sure we could make a blue dog,” says Long. “But I’m not
convinced there would be a huge demand for it.”
Perhaps not. But last year, French scientists created a green fluorescent
rabbit for artist Eduardo Kac
(New Scientist, 6 January, p 34).
He’d wanted it to be a dog, but canine reproductive technology can’t do that yet.
For GM pets, the key technology is cloning. Genetic engineering on its own is
a hit-and-miss affair. Tinkering with hard-to-obtain eggs, implanting them and
then looking for the one in a thousand or more that has the desired traits is
very wasteful.
But if you can clone an animal, you can start by altering ordinary body
cells, which are plentiful and easy to manipulate. “You can verify you’ve made
the change in the gene you want, and nowhere else,” says Long. If you then clone
these cells, all the offspring should have the desired characteristics.
So far, however, no one has cloned a cat or dog. But researchers are
confident they can do it. In cats, many of the necessary steps—maturing
eggs, culturing embryos and establishing pregnancies—have already been
developed because people hope to use these techniques to help save threatened
species.
Some companies are also working on the problem because of the potentially
lucrative market for cloning beloved pets. Canine Cryobank, for example, already
sells home kits for around $150 for freezing samples from a pet to keep
until cloning is possible. And if you’re going to clone Fluffy, why stop there?
Why not make Fluffy II a new and improved version? “If your first cat died of
cancer, you might make the next one resistant to that kind of tumour,” says
Damiani.
Cloning and modifying individual animals is likely to remain the preserve of
the rich. Nevertheless, GM pets could still be sold cheaply, as animals can be
bred normally once they’ve been created.
But it’s becoming clear that many clones, even those that make it to
adulthood, have health problems
(New Scientist, 19 May, p 14).
Andrew Kimbrell,
a lawyer and director of the International Center for Technology Assessment in
Washington DC, thinks that welfare issues like this will fuel opposition to
transgenic pets. “Can I imagine a groundswell of support for Congress banning
this work because of cruelty? Certainly,” he says.
The would-be cloners say the science is improving all the time. And the
companies say that they are dedicated to keeping any suffering to a minimum. GSC
and ACT, for example, already promise all the animals they create will be
adopted as pets. “You can’t go into this business without that moral
commitment,” says Long. “You’d be crucified by the media and the public.”
Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in
the US, is not convinced. Besides the health problems that plague some clones,
she says that tinkering with genes could have unknown consequences. “It’s
marvellous to think you could really have a health breakthrough without hurting
animals. But in reality it is all a bit of a crapshoot.”
And animal welfare is just one issue. Transgenic pets could pass genes on to
their wild cousins. Some species are already endangered due to interbreeding
with domestic pets. GM pets might hasten the process.
In Europe, this isn’t so much of a worry because GM pets would fall under the
existing regulations on releasing GMOs. “For a GM pet to be approved for sale,
we’d need to get all member states signed up to it,” says Alan Gray, chairman of
the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (ACRE). “Even a hamster in
a cage, you’d have to ask if the hamster could escape.”
He also points out that the environmental impact issues could be very
complex. What effect, for instance, will the Fel d 1 deletion have on a cat’s
fleas?
But in the US, it isn’t clear that any regulation covers the sale and release
of GM pets. Here, dog-wolf hybrids are often created intentionally. But many
owners find the animals uncontrollable and release them. Even so, the risk of
any genetic change—the removal of an allergen, say—spreading to wild
wolf populations is very low. But it still worries Alan Armistead, a wildlife
biologist with the US Department of Agriculture in Denver. “These genes have
been selected for aeons,” he says. “Maybe they have no real purpose, or maybe we
just don’t know yet.” Damiani says his company is considering if all its pets
should be sterilised for this reason. However, neutering and spaying isn’t 100
per cent reliable.
Newkirk is also worried about the long-term consequences of made-to-order
animals becoming familiar members of families. “It just brings us another step
closer to human cloning and genetic modification,” she says.
But Alexander Capron, a bioethicist at the University of Southern California
in Los Angeles, isn’t so sure. “Because someone feels comfortable controlling
their Siamese cat’s genes, that doesn’t mean that they will approve of doing the
same thing to a child,” he says.
