American Beat: Just Cloning Around

I also watched an informational video featuring a woman talking about the untimely death of her 18-year-old cat, Tweedy. The woman, Jeanne Shelby, felt like she'd lost her best friend. Sure, she had two other cats, but no one could replace Tweedy. Shelby said she searched for a way to fill the empty catbox in her heart. "It's like cancer, you want to know what your options are," she said. Until the advent of cat cloning, of course, Shelby basically had only two options: Adopt another cat and fall in love again. Or turn embittered and let her heart fill with hate and anger.

Now, she had a third option: Withdraw $50,000 from her bank account, scrape a few cells off Tweedy's skin, and wait for the Genetic Savings and Clone stork. While I waited for Baba Ganoush and Tabouli, I started asking onlookers why they were here. "I'm here to see the sickness!" said Donna Natoli from New Jersey. "There is no point to cloning a cat. Everyone is meant to die, cats, dogs, humans."

Without prompting, Natoli told me, "Even you." Yes, I am meant to die, but I got the sense from Natoli that she was hoping it would happen sooner rather than later.

I managed to survive until the company's feline surrogate manager Leslie Ungerer began her presentation, first asking us to "stay behind the red rope...for security reasons, you understand." (No, I didn't. Are these cats or Osama bin Laden?). Next, she pulled out Tahini, the female Bengal who gave up the cells that later became Tabouli and Baba Ganoush. I was unimpressed by Tahini. The cat was not only lazy and bored, but she completely lacked the star quality that you see even in cats with far fewer accomplishments (like Morris. He has that thing that makes him a legend, does he not? Morris has a jaded cool, while Tahini is merely lethargic). Then Ungerer put Tahini back in the cage and removed Baba Ganoush from a separate cage (the clones are kept separate from their "mother" because they get along like cats and dogs. Paging Dr. Freud!).

Baba Ganoush made her appearance and the flashbulbs started popping. It was the biggest thing to hit the Cat Show since the hairless cat debut a few years ago (I was there, too. How could I forget it? Holding a hairless cat was one of the most unpleasant experiences in my journalistic career. It was like holding a hot water bottle with bones).

Ungerer took questions from the crowd, but almost everyone asked the same one: "Do the clones have the same personality as Tahini?" (which would be a tricky thing considering that cats don't have personality, after all).