We know how unlikely it is that we personally share a home with the most amazing animal in history.

But when we assure our canine companions that they are the best doggy ever, we mean it.

We believe this despite dealing with their barking, their personality quirks, their occasional health challenges,

and the fact that because of them, we can't have nice things.

Their flaw is that they don't live forever.

But now some entrepreneurs are offering what sounds like the next best thing.

From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd.

If you've got a properly preserved tissue sample and $50,000, you can request a cloned copy of your dog.

There's no guarantee, but if the procedure is successful, it takes about eight months from the time you place your order to the delivery of a living puppy with the identical genes to the ones you have loved and lost.

But even if it all goes according to plan, is it the right thing to do?

Alexandra Horowitz is Senior Research Fellow and head of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Her article for The New Yorker is titled, Would You Clone Your Dog?

Alexandra, welcome back to think.

Hi, Chris. Great to be back.

So you went to visit a guy named John Mandola who lives on Long Island.

He is a retired police officer, so presumably not somebody

with enormous wealth to throw around. But he spent $50,000 having his dog Princess

cloned after she died. What made the original Princess so special? Well, I think that's a question that any owner would answer with alacrity.

There were things that to John and to all the people who've had their dogs or cat's

cacophoned were idiosyncratic, individual, in some ways, irreproducible.

This was a dog who he had adopted when he was on duty

and the dog was brought in as a stray.

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