“I Cloned My Dog—They Have Completely Different Personalities”, 2022-01-30 (; backlinks; similar):
Sydney’s always been a ball-crazy dog, too. From a very young age, she just loved chasing a ball. But it wasn’t until she was 6 years old that something really remarkable happened. I was taking her for a midnight walk on Granville Island in Vancouver when she smelt the scent of a ball underground and just went after it. She spent 30 minutes digging a hole and retrieved that ball. It dawned on me then that if I could replace the scent of a ball with a sulfide scent, we could train her to be a prospector.
…As a mineral prospecting company, we will typically visit a location after an aerial geophysical survey has taken place. A plane will have mapped the area and if that survey has shown some geophysical anomaly, something that could indicate a sulfidic mineral; say nickel, copper or gold, we will then hike through to investigate further. After I trained Sydney to detect sulfide scents, she would join us. If there is cover on the ground that obscures our view, she is able to detect any sulfidic minerals beneath. Provided it’s a reasonable depth of course, she can’t detect minerals buried 100 meters underground! Her method is to dig away at the ground, and then she’ll make a little nest on what she finds and go to sleep on it. She’s done her job at that stage and then she’s so happy she just has a nap. But it’s not like dogs hunting a scent across the countryside, it’s quite a calm procedure.
…very few dogs can detect mineral sulfides and report back on them in the way she can. We tried to see if Border Collies could do it, and they only could, but only to a degree. We then spent about 6 months with an Australian Cattle dog called Jake but he still didn’t have Sydney’s capability…Over the years we tried various other dogs but none had the capacity for detection that Sydney has.
…Then, in 2019, I discovered a place in Texas that clones pets, called ViaGen, and they were very easy to deal with. A local veterinarian completed a biopsy so we could provide tissue samples for the cloning process, those samples were sent to ViaGen for further processing and placed in storage until we pulled the trigger to clone Sydney in 2021. I have no real understanding of the specifics of the cloning process, other than what I had to be involved in and provide in terms of tissue samples, but I have always been an advocate for animal welfare locally and in Mexico. Cloning Sydney cost us $50,000 and we thought that meant we were getting one puppy in the fall of 2021. Then, on July 9, I got a call saying, “Your puppies have arrived.”
…Both [cloned puppies, Olivia and Fiona] are also completely ball crazy and very agile…I have found it takes around 400 training sessions, each around 15 minutes long, for a dog to develop confidence to hunt a particular scent, but our training is incredibly kind to the dogs and we see lack of praise as a punishment. Olivia and Fiona’s official training is in its early stages, but both show incredible aptitude for one or two scents related to copper, nickel, gold and diamond. They really do have Sydney’s instinct when it comes to scenting, but they go about it differently. My first indication of the puppies’ ability to detect scents happened with Fiona, I was leash training her with a harness when she was 100 days old. As we walked through the yard, she put on the brakes, started digging, and found a buried bone that was about 3 inches under the soil. She has been introduced to bones before, but she instinctively smelt this bone that had probably been buried there for more than a year.
People have different reactions to cloning, some think it’s OK and others think it’s wrong because there are so many dogs in shelters already. I can understand that perspective, but in our particular situation there really wasn’t any other option than to reproduce Sydney in the way we did…in my work circles, people know all about Sydney, so they are really enchanted by the puppies. Anyone familiar with Sydney is excited that there are 2 more of her around to continue her legacy of mineral detection.
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I Cloned My Dog—They Have Completely Different Personalities