There is something just so tomorrow about the Russian robo-therapists with their mechanical cats.
Alexander Libin softly strokes the orange-cream fur of NeCoRo -- a semi-realistic cat-robot packed with visual, auditory and movement-sensitive sensors and weighing 3.5 pounds -- while his wife, Elena, serves tea and cookies. They are in their home office on the sixth floor of the Willoughby, a blend-in high-rise in Friendship Heights. In their mid-forties, the Libins are slim-neat and smart-chipper as they talk about the future of pets.
"She's like a real pet," Alex says. He's petting a tabby nicknamed Cleo and, by gosh, it does look like a cat, or some come-alive stuffed animal from a high-end horror movie. It is much more lifelike than Sony's Erector-Set-like robo-dog, Aibo.
Cleo lounges on the dining table, stretches its paws, arches its back, twitches its tail, opens and shuts its eyes. When it turns its neck you can hear a creepy mechanical whirring sound: reh-uh-reh, reh-uh-reh.
Self-described robo-therapists and affiliated faculty members at Georgetown University, the Libins believe in the restorative value of animal companions. The catbot, they explain, is easier for many people -- the elderly, the allergy-stricken, the autistic and disabled children and adults -- to relate to than a real cat. Developed by Omron Corp. of Japan, the mecho-pets are not yet available in the United States, Libin says.
They do not have to be fed or cleaned up after. Other variations -- a teddy bear and a baby seal -- are in development at other labs, and some people believe robotic pets of all kind will be omnipresent in the near future.
Cleo meows obnoxiously and occasionally hisses unless you touch it a certain way, tripping special sensors, and then it closes its eyes, relaxes and purrs or mews contentedly. "She just got back from a conference where she met 50 people," Elena says, talking about the catbot.
"That makes Cleo a little nervous," Alex says.
The whole scene makes you a little nervous. As you delve into the future of pets on this planet, and any others we may land on, you discover at least three possibilities: robotic, cloned and biologically reprogrammed. It's a foggy, uncharted world of cuddly robots, copycat puppies, nonallergenic cats, glowing fish, gargantuan guinea pigs, miniature hippos and the reestablishment of endangered or extinct species that could put us all in danger.
Because pets are not human but are endowed with personality, intelligence and emotion, they are the perfect foils -- in-between beings -- for our scientific curiosity. Think about it. Of course scientists are going to tamper with their genetic structures! You bet they'll tinker with their bloodlines! Breeders have been doing that for years. But now pet researchers can implant software, readjust the genome and conduct experiments in interspecies embryo transfer in ways that have never been done before.
"I'm not scared of the robots," says Alex as he pets Cleo. "I'm scared of the people."
Copies for life
America is pet crazy. We own more than 140 million pets, according to the Pet Food Institute. Talk to pet industry folks about the future and they send you to Blockbuster to rent "The 6th Day," a 2000 Arnold Schwarzenegger clunker that includes a lengthy contemplation of pet cloning.
In the futuristic flick, Schwarzenegger walks into RePet, a retail cloning shop, to explore the cellular replacement of his just-died family dog.
"We can clone your four-legged loved one in just a few short hours," the sleazy salesman says. The result will be an exact replica. "He'll know all the same tricks you taught him. He'll remember where all the bones are buried."
These days pet cloning cannot be done in a few hours, but it can be done, and some visionaries see this as the future of pets -- you find a dog or cat you love and you make copies of it for life.
Genetics Savings & Clone, a pet-cloning company based in California with labs in Wisconsin, is considered the leader in the industry -- if you can call a few far-out and flaky-named companies an industry.
Over the past couple of years, GS&C has cloned several kittens and delivered two to customers. The company also reports that it plans to clone a dog this year. Though GS&C says the clones' owners prefer anonymity, it does provide a videotape of what it describes as its cloned kittens romping, and rolling and pouncing around. In one segment, Lou Hawthorne, the firm's honey-voiced chief executive officer, holds one of the kitties, Little Gizmo, while telling the camera that he offered Little Gizmo's owner, Dan, $100,000 in exchange for his just-delivered clone. "He just laughed," Hawthorne says.
In another segment, Hawthorne presents a newly minted clone, Little Nicky, to its owner, who is identified only as Julie. The cloning was completed in December, he says, and GS&C refers to Little Nicky as the first cloned pet ever sold to a paying customer. Julie tells the camera that the offspring is identical to the donor and she is overcome with emotion. Hundreds of pet lovers, who have banked DNA with GS&C, are waiting for just such a magical moment, says company spokesman Ben Carlson.
All this would seem like so much voodoo were it not for the successes reported and verified -- sheep, cows, horses and others.
At the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species in New Orleans -- a privately and state-supported facility that has also reported successful cloning -- Director Betsy Dresser is collecting DNA samples from endangered species losing their natural habitats because of human development. Dresser and her group have cloned a number of African wildcats and an antelope. Her work is intriguing because her techniques may be used to clone exotic -- and not-so-exotic -- pets in the future.
Philip Damiani, chief scientific officer at GS&C, is the former senior scientist at the Audubon cloning center. He is toiling away to meet a 2005 deadline for cloning a dog, which is more challenging than cloning a cat. It's more difficult to work with a dog's egg to produce cloned embryos and to coordinate the transfer of a cloned embryo with the infrequent estrus cycle of the surrogate mother. Dogs go into heat only once or twice a year; cats have a more frequent cycle. "I feel the pressure every day when I come to work," Damiani says. The price for a cloned pet is $32,000.
But to Martha Armstrong of the Washington-based Humane Society of the United States, pet cloning is just plain wrong. "Spending $32,000 to purchase an animal is to me an outrageous sum of money," Armstrong says. She suggests pet adoption. "There is a perfectly healthy, perfectly nice animal just waiting for a home."
Cloning, she says, "doesn't guarantee that an animal is going to have a nice personality."
The real tragedy of cloning, she says, is the pain and suffering that results from the process. "Dolly had a gazillion ones before her," Armstrong says. "They all died."
Carlson says GS&C is using newer technology that reduces the risk of cloning mishaps. However, he says, "the efficiencies are not very good. It varies by species."
He says, "You are not getting one live born for every clone embryo. Most are not going to take, or abort early. That's one of the reasons cloning is so expensive."
Wave of the future?
Cloning, says Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, "may in some ways be overhyped." Bringing back your dead pet is not all it's cracked up to be, he says. "The new dog won't know the old tricks."
And, Caplan adds, it's way too expensive for most people.
Nor is Caplan a believer in robotic pets. "I don't think people are going to bond with their robo-pets in the way they do with organic pets."
But the lessons being learned in the robotics clean rooms and cloning labs -- by the Libins, Dresser, Damiani and others -- may prove fruitful when the pets of tomorrow are created.
"Genetic engineering is the wave of the future," Caplan says. People will be in the market for animals that can live in apartments and are easier to take care of. And for pets that are more obedient, quicker to learn and, Caplan says, "in some instances even nastier than some pit bull situations."
We are seeing early signs of these lab-modified pets. The GloFish, a glowing zebra fish imbued with a fluorescence gene, arrived in pet stores last year. Allerca, a California-based company, is advertising the near-future development of "lifestyle pets" -- such as a short-haired cat bred for allergy sufferers -- using genetic technology. Time will tell if their techniques work.
There is nothing inherently wrong with pet modification, Caplan says, if it produces "pets that leave a smaller footprint on the environment." Or a pet with some worthwhile purpose. Increasing the life span of a cherished pet or curing its hearing defect or hip dysplasia is a noble cause, Caplan says. "But the debate will center in another direction."
He believes there is an appetite for "freakish traits" in pets and he sees an ominous coming day: the eight-legged dog, for example.
"Using genetic engineering to create freaks or oddities is wrong," he says, "in pets as in humans."
And the world will be divided between the natural-pet group and the engineered-pet group. "They'll probably coexist and sneer at each other," he says.
Martha Armstrong of the Humane Society of the United States is dead set against frivolous modifications. "If someone is creating a designer dog or cat that fits your lifestyle so you don't sneeze," she believes you might not be cut out to be a pet owner.
She says, "Who are we doing this for? Certainly not for the benefit of the animal. Healthy dogs and cats are being destroyed. Someone wants to manipulate a dog or cat to make it fit into their lifestyle, or clone a new animal simply because they want a replica, they are not going to get what they are looking for, and there are going to be a lot of discards as a result of trying to."
All of the talk about cloning and gene-manipulation reminds Armstrong of a Mark Twain witticism: "If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat."
In "The 6th Day," Schwarzenegger's character asks the slippery pet-clone salesman if he will be able to trust the replicated dog -- "a large animal with large teeth" -- to be gentle with his daughter.
The salesman smiles. "We can make him smaller if you want, with softer teeth. We can even color-coordinate him to match your decorating scheme."
From his Wisconsin lab, Damiani says he is focusing on cloning for now. "Eventually," he says, "there is the possibility to do genetic modification when we do cloning. We clone from cultured cells and that gives us the opportunity to modify the DNA in those cells, then screen the cells to see if the modification worked and then use the new cells to clone with."
Using the petri dish instead of the age-old stud/bitch process that has given us Australian cattle dogs that know how to nip at the heels of cows and German shorthair pointers that are natural-born hunters, scientists will be able to: put the breeding process on super-fast forward; work with purebred cats, which have always been as difficult to manage as, well, a herd of cats; and create heretofore-unimagined combinations and recombinations.
You want a "pooset hound," with the curly coat of a poodle and the ears of a basset hound? How about a "Great Daneshund" with the body of a dachshund and the legs of a Great Dane?
Susan McCarthy, author of "Becoming a Tiger: How Baby Animals Learn to Live in the Wild," imagines a near-future in which even endangered species -- the wild cats and antelopes that Dresser is already cloning -- will be running around the urban apartment. She sees the possibility of tiny gorillas and two-foot-high giraffes.
The history of animal companions is long and complicated and full of surprises. In some cultures, cheetahs have been kept as pets and wolves have been raised like dogs. So turning wolves into little purse pups and feral jungle cats into bike-basket kitties makes perfect -- or imperfect -- sense. Can't you just see ptiny pterodactyls in Parisian bird cages and genetically defanged rattlesnakes playing with the kids in the sandbox? Michael Crichton, courtesy phone.
In the near future, "our pets could start looking alien and strange to some people," says bioethicist Caplan. "But that would already be true for the Hittites, the Assyrians and the Han Chinese. They wouldn't recognize our pets."
Some recognized breeds date back only a few years. The American hairless terrier line began in the 1970s, the British Victorian bulldog in the 1980s.
"As long as we are the species in control," says Betsy Dresser, "we are always going to look to technology to provide things for us that we want."
It's arguable whether owners or pets are in control at the moment. Genetic modification might finally liberate humans from their servitude to their pets -- no more walking them, feeding them, pooper-scooping up after them. On the other hand, we might miss it.
One thing we want is the ideal pet, she says, "whether it's a perfectly formed Persian cat or a miniature horse that we can bring into our living room."
The possibility of altering animals raises lots of new future-pet questions, Dresser says. For instance: "What kind of pets will we take with us to other planets?"
Hitting the 'off' switch
That sobering and intoxicating question brings us back to robotics.
Sherry Turkle, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and author of "The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit," believes there is a huge future for robotic pets -- on this planet and others. Like the Libins, she has been studying the effects of robotic pets on people. She is convinced that people are responding to the new generation of robo-pets because people are basically lonely and vulnerable. And though they may not want to feed and clean up after the mechanical animals, they do want more and more expressions of affection from the machines. "We are being asked to take care of these computers," she says. "And that is one of the most seductive things."
Humans should be wary, she says. "Nurturance is the killer app."
And, of course, this puts us back into willing servitude.
Irony alert: As we build more-needy machines that act more like animals, we are also developing less-needy animals that act more like machines.
With pets, as with just about everything else, there is never just one future. There are many -- varied and diverse. The futures of pets are less certain than our own. We will grow old, our memories will melt away, we will continue our quest for novelty, and community and love. Ultimately, the kind of pet we will choose in our own future says as much about us as it does about our options. Are we comfortable with machines or do we like the woodsy smell of a hunting dog's coat? Would we rather speak to our Internet-informed parrot or dangle yarn between a kitten's little paws?
"Robotic pets in some ways have advantages," says the Human Society's Armstrong. But there is true joy "in seeing a person respond to a kitten or cat that purrs, sits in their lap, or a dog that licks its face. It's that heartbeat. It's that living thing. I hardly think a robotic pet makes somebody feel needed."
Or possibly robotic pets will create a whole new variety of relationships.
Back in the Libins' home office, Cleo the robot cat meows and meows. It's a cool day and the windows are open. Real birds twitter in the real trees as the real sun sets.
Alex Libin says that living with robotic pets has given him an even greater appreciation for real-life animals. But he also appreciates the robot's gifts: Though Cleo is animatronically correct, it is strictly confined in its movements, and there is no chance it will accidentally walk across the table, knock over the plate of cookies, bump into cups of hot tea or interfere in any way with the couple's lifestyle.
As the Libins move around the room, Cleo's mechanical mewing becomes more pronounced. It is agitated and does not want to settle down. "She needs a lot of attention," Elena Libin explains.
Alex laughs and says his wife is now performing therapy on the robot. "The main idea behind these robots," says Alex, "was to create a model of a living creature."
The more life-like the robot, the more people respond.
Of course, Alex says above the constant mewing, there is one trumping advantage that Cleo has over any real or cloned or genetically modified pet. "If you become extremely annoyed," he says, "you can just turn her off."
