Cooper: "I am not a widget!"

I'm all for curing cancer and for early detection of it, but why does it have to be at the expense of our beloved dogs? A Japanese dog-training company, the St. Sugar Cancer Sniffing Dog-Training Center, and a Korean biotech company, RNL Bio, are joining forces to attempt to clone and then train a Japanese dog who is good at sniffing out human cancer cells, or so I read in an article late last week. This is just wrong on so many levels.

First, can you say, "companion animal overpopulation"? Both Japan and South Korea have this problem in spades, so how can they justify creating even more dogs? Right—they can't. It's never justified as long as healthy, adoptable dogs are being euthanized in animal shelters just because they have no home.

Second, this experiment (and that's what it is) is pretty invasive. They extracted two embryos from the original sniffer dog, a black lab whose name is Marine, and implanted them into surrogate mother dogs. That doesn't sound like much fun. And I wonder what these dogs' living conditions are like.

Third, how will the cloned dogs live once they're born? In the article, it says that they will both be trained at the St. Sugar center, then one will remain there, where this whole exploitative idea was cooked up, and the other one "will … be brought back to South Korea for study at the university." That doesn't sound good.

And these are just the first two. If the experiment succeeds, there will be more. South Korea has already successfully cloned sniffer dogs to detect drugs and explosives. They're in training as we speak and scheduled to start working next month.

Why can't people be more humane? Just thinking about this cockeyed cancer-sniffing project for five minutes, I can come up with a better, more dog-friendly way to do it myself. All dogs have excellent noses, so why not start a cancer-sniffing training program for dogs that's open to the public—sort of like agility training classes for dogs, which dogs thoroughly enjoy (I used to take my late husky, Darby, who was always extremely eager to show off). Then the people whose dogs excel and graduate from the program would be eligible to hang out a shingle and advertise their dog's cancer-sniffing services. Set up this way, it would all just be a fun hobby for the dog and an altruistic vocation for the dog's guardian.

There would be no need for any forced reproduction or invasive experimentation, and all sniffer dogs would live at home with their families. But apparently "training the clones of a skilled sniffer dog is easier than training ordinary canines." Well, how much easier? So much easier that it warrants doing intrusive experiments on dogs and forcing them to live in laboratories? I don't think so. Most dogs are trainable, and for them an exquisitely sensitive nose is standard issue.

Dogs are so generous with us humans—they do so much for us and give us so much love unconditionally even when we don't reciprocate. It would be so refreshing if these greedy experimenters could recognize that and act accordingly, instead of treating them like mass-producible widgets.