Do Cloned Wild Animals Have Instincts?
Snuppy, the cloned Afghan Hound Seoul National University Let's ask Betsy Dresser, the senior vice president of research at the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species in New Orleans, who has raised several litters of small African wildcat clones. "Oh yes, the clones are very much wild animals with wild instincts," she says. "They bite and scratch. You can't handle them without gloves and nets." Dresser uses domestic cats as surrogate mothers for African wildcat embryos, and although a tabby mother can calm the kittens, her influence doesn't last. "They aren't as hissy, and they don't fight as much," she says. "But once you get them away from domestic cats, especially once puberty sets in, their aggressive survival behavior emerges." Clones aren't blank slates, Dresser explains. They're exact genetic copies of another creature. The behaviors that make African wildcats successful hunters in the savannah are, fundamentally, made possible by the activation...