Miracle Puppies! Cloned Dog Becomes a Father
By WebVet.com
The first commercially cloned dog has become a father! A Florida couple that paid over $155,000 to clone their beloved Labrador Sir Lancelot after his death have welcomed eight puppies fathered by Lancelot Encore.
And now these miracle puppies could be yours: Nina Otto is keeping one of Lancelot Encore's offspring and selling the other seven online at labraclone.com, which boasts that they are "future pups from the past." She won't publicly reveal how much money one of the genetic anomalies will set you back.
Otto admitted that breeding Lancelot Encore was difficult. In most cases, a mother pays a stud -- but the tables were turned in this case because of her dog's unusual pedigree, and the fact that he is not registered by the American Kennel Club because of his cloned background.
'We needed a female and there were a lot of people that might not have wanted to use a dog that might not have had a pedigree at the time," she explained. Luckily a bitch surfaced, who was then artificially inseminated -- and eventually gave birth to eight healthy puppies on July 4th. In honor of their birthday, the pups have been named Glory, Liberty, Star, Allegiance, America, Patriot, Independence and Victory.
Otto and her husband Edgar made international headlines when they won a 2009 auction by BioArts for the opportunity to clone Sir Lancelot. His DNA was sent to a South Korean lab where it was put into an egg -- and Lancelot Encore was born. Nina has said that Encore is a carbon copy of his predecessor, even displaying the same habits and movements.
Lancelot Encore as a puppy:
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