March 2, 2002

SOME CATS ARE WORTH HAVING MORE THAN ONCE

When I saw the picture of little CC, Carbon Copy the cloned kitten, my first thought was, ``Maybe we'll be able to clone Greystoke.''

Greystoke is my son Peter's cat, and, I discovered, Peter's reaction to CC was the same as mine.

Peter was in college when we adopted Greystoke as a kitten. He was gray all over, hence his name, but the colors migrated as he grew and now he is a black cat with white underparts. He is a cat of considerable weight and great dignity; if the term ``gravitas'' can be applied to a cat, Greystoke possesses gravitas.

He is also an exceptionally smart cat, which is why the idea of providing myself with his twin the next time I need to replace a cat is so appealing.

It has always been my experience that if one is in need of a cat, a cat will find one. However, I have cats for my purposes, not for theirs, and smart cats are much more interesting company than stupid ones.

Greystoke maintains his position as the chief cat among four with an unclawed combat technique of his own devising we have named cat-jitsu. Playful Maya likes to pounce on undefended objects, including twitchy cat tails. Anticipating Maya, incoming, Greystoke rolls over on his back with perfect timing to catch her in mid-air, juggle her with his paws and toss her onward so hard that she has the breath knocked out of her.

Stokes' relations with his people are also innovative.

Peter says that when he went away for several days (for the first time since Greystoke was a kitten), the cat adapted Peter's cat-attraction behavior to summon him home.

``I do `gra-a-a-ay-stoke' (long, high-pitched first syllable, second syllable short and falling in pitch),'' he writes, ``followed by a gradually louder pat-pat-pat-pat-pat noise, generally hitting my leg.''

While Peter was gone, Greystoke took to saying ``me-e-e-e-yeow (in the same pattern of pitch and duration) while making loud thumps with his paws on the carpet (run-run-run-run-run).''

He'd never done that before. Who knows what he was thinking, or how it is to think without words? But it certainly looks like ``This is how he gets me to come. So this is how I get him to come.''

His inference is wrong, in fact, because there is essential information about human affairs that the cat does not have. But it's logical enough given what he does know, like belief in cargo cults.

Opponents of cloning, and of cloning pets in particular, sneer that pet owners are deluded simpletons who foolishly imagine that their relationship with a beloved pet will be reincarnated.

That's not a valid argument against the practice, because it's obviously not what Peter and I are thinking. We have six cats between us, and there's only one we'd bother to clone. Most cats are decorative, affectionate and eminently replaceable.

Then, making much of the fact that CC's coat is patterned differently from her genetic twin, opponents also argue that a clone wouldn't resemble the original animal. But appearance is only fur-deep; we're interested in intelligence and personality.

Intelligence in humans is highly heritable. It would be more so if the environments and cultures in which they live were not so dissimilar, so culture should be less important in cats. Personality also has a strong genetic base. One would expect a cat and its later clone, especially if raised by the same person, to be as strikingly similar as identical twins are, even when they're raised apart.

Sorry, I'm not going on any guilt trips about adoptable cats in shelters. Their being there is none of my doing, and I've rescued my share of strays. It makes no difference to the shelter population whether I commission a clone to get the kind of cat I know will suit me, or buy a purebred cat, which lots of people do without arousing controversy.

To get CC, researchers needed fewer than 100 cells from her sister. The price is astronomical now, but it will come down. And it would not injure either Greystoke or his dignity if we preserved a bit of his DNA in case we wanted to use it later.