Ever look at your elderly dog and wish she were a puppy again?
Well, for about $100,000, a South Korean lab will clone her for you.
“The world would be a better place with more Winnies in it,” Rebecca Smith, 29, of London said, holding her elderly dachshund, Winnie, as part of a Channel 4 documentary entitled “The £60,000 Puppy: Cloning Man’s Best Friend.”
See photos of other cloned animals.
Smith won Sooam Biotech’s first dog cloning competition in the United Kingdom, which drew entries from dozens of enthusiastic dog owners eager to get the pricey cloning for free.
“Sooam Biotech is looking for one person with the most special and inspiring reason for cloning his/her beloved dog,” the announcement stated when the contest kicked off. Entrants submitted videos to YouTube to prove that their dog deserved to be cloned the most.
In Smith’s video, she introduced Winnie as her “little sausage dog” and recited a poem.
Sooam Biotech took samples of Winnie’s skin to gather her DNA, which was placed in a donated egg from a dog of the same breed and implanted into a surrogate.
The clone puppy, named Mini Winnie, was born March 30, according to the documentary. She will go home in about six months.
TLC network did a similar documentary two years ago about a woman who cloned her dog, Trouble, for $50,000. Trouble's owner spoke to ABC News's Dan Harris about the experience. Watch it here.
John Woestendiek -- who wrote a book about the dog-cloning industry called “Dog, Inc.” -- told ABC News in 2012 that the practice raises ethical questions because the surrogate dogs are often sent back to farms to be killed or eaten after the lab uses them. In addition, it is a slippery slope to human cloning, he said.
"You're not really getting your dog come back to life," he said. "You're getting a genetic duplicate or twin, and we know how different twins can be. I mean, what's special about your dog, that's the part that can't be cloned. In effect, the person who is getting a dog clone is paying $100,000 to get a blank canvas."
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