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The Sunday Magazine23:29What science can tell us about our pets – from owning them, to cloning them
Chances are you or someone you know proudly identifies as a “pet parent.”
And that’s no surprise. As the Canadian Animal Health Institute (CAHI) has found, Canada has one of the highest pet ownership rates in the world.
According to data compiled by the federal government, more than 12 million Canadian households had at least one cat or dog in 2024. Cats and dogs are the most popular animal companions, with populations of 8.9 million, and 8.3 million, respectively.
Canadians also keep millions of birds, fish and reptiles as pets.
Research has shown that owning a pet has proven positive impacts on people’s health and wellness, but Jay Ingram, author of The Science of Pets, says those benefits don’t fully account for humans’ powerful urge to connect with the natural world.
Asked why humans keep pets, Ingram says there are many opinions, but no definitive answer. One theory he points to is prominent evolutionary biologist, Edward O. Wilson’s “biophilia” hypothesis. Wilson, who died in 2021, argued that humans’ natural affinity for other living things is the essence of our humanity and binds us to all other living species.
Our desire to build stronger human-animal bonds has pushed science to find ways to clone animals and decipher their communication patterns. The science writer and broadcaster spoke to The Sunday Magazine guest host David Common about those efforts. Here’s an excerpt of their conversation.
Celebrities like Paris Hilton and Tom Brady [who’s invested in Colossal Biosciences, a biotechnology and genetic engineering company] have cloned pets. It’s a relatively modern phenomenon but does it happen often?
It happens a lot more than people think. I quote a scientific paper in the book, “[Insights from] one thousand cloned dogs,” but that was published several years ago so you can imagine there are probably thousands of cloned dogs now.
The thing about cloning is it involves a misunderstanding of what you’re actually going to get. People expect a clone to be identical in every respect, but that’s simply not going to happen. Anybody that knows a pair of identical human twins knows that, with very rare exceptions, they’re not identical at all. Not in their behaviour, not even in their looks. There are a lot of genetic influences that happen after you get the set of genes that you’re born with; same thing with a cloned dog. Barbra Streisand found that because she wanted a particular kind of curl to the fur of her cloned dog but she got three dogs and none of them had it. So, it’s the expectation of identity that is incorrect.
Cloning began in the 1960s, not as sophisticated as it is now or likely will be in the future, but what’s the goal? What have scientists been trying to learn?
I would say that it’s not so much a scientific enterprise these days but an economic one. Entire teams of polo horses have been cloned. You get one great horse… an amazing polo horse, and they tried to clone that horse as many times as they could so they could get replacement horses that were physically, at least, comparable to the original. It happens in agriculture, it’s widespread but it’s usually for an economic purpose. I’m not convinced that cloning a dog or cat is going to become something that is routinely used to create replacement pets.
In our times of need, pets seem to be there, when we’re sad or angry, they respond. They know when we’re mourning somehow, dogs and cats in particular. It makes us wonder what do our pets know. How open is the scientific community to animal sentience?
I think there’s a great deal of openness to sentience. If you asked me, “how much do we know about what goes on in a dog or a cat’s mind or any of the animals that one can feel compassion or love for,” it’s just not well known. I think there’s an opportunity, especially with AI, to start to understand in greater detail what cats and dogs might be thinking, but we’re a long way from that.
London Morning6:19If your dog could text you, what do you think they would say?
Most pet owners would love two-way conversations with their furry friends, one London dog owner gets texts from her dog. Meg Jarvis told CBC’s Kendra Seguin how she taught her dog Ruby to text her with the help of a message board.
Progress is being made more rapidly with wild animals because wild animals aren’t contaminated by a pet owner’s thinking. Scientists are able to look at, say, sperm whales’ clicks and start to see patterns that nobody suspected, but they’re not importing their own emotional feelings on that data. Whereas, if you’re talking to a dog owner who’s convinced that their dog will feel or show guilt if they steal a treat. That idea has been completely dismissed by proving that the dog is expressing something that the owner defines as guilt in response to the owner chiding the dog or looking critically at the dog. The dog does not spontaneously feel guilty as far as anyone has ever been able to determine.
There’s a guy in Arizona who has identified 30 different prairie dog calls. A prairie dog can communicate “a man in red is over there” because they have calls for different animals and colours. I think that’s where progress is going to be made. I’m afraid that the human element in petkeeping is actually a hindrance to really learning what goes on in their minds. And of course, there’s always the possibility that the way they think is so foreign to the way we think, that we may never understand it.
