Jay Ingram's latest book tackles our frequently asked questions about pets — read an excerpt now

Have you ever wondered why your dog spins around when they're excited? Or if your cat really likes your company? Jay Ingram's latest book The Science of Pets aims to answer those questions and more, through rigorous research and reporting. 

"We are entering an unprecedented era of pet ownership. Both the global demand for pets and the variety of animals bred or captured to satisfy that demand are going through the roof," he told CBC Books in an email.

"At the same time we're just starting to gain insights into how pets think and feel. What we need now is a better understanding our side of the relationship."

Ingram is the Victoria-based former host of CBC Radio's Quirks & Quarks. He is the author of 20 books, which have been translated into 15 languages, including the five-volume The Science of Why series.

Ingram won the Walter C. Alvarez Award from the American Medical Writers' Association for excellence in health care communications in 2015 and is a Member of the Order of Canada.

In his signature easy-to-understand writing packed with insights and funny asides, Ingram's The Science of Pets makes science accessible as it relates to our every day life and the pets we love so dearly.

"Readers might be surprised by the sheer volume of scientific research on pets, including how pet ownership disturbs the natural world, how we may never know when our ancestors began keeping pets and how, above all, anything we learn about pets tells us something about ourselves."

The Science of Pets will be released on Nov. 4, 2025. You can read an excerpt below.

Bring 'em Back Alive

Freeze drying and/or taxidermy have a strong appeal for those who can't imagine living without some sort of presence of their deceased pet with them. Others, dissatisfied with this approach, want a living version of their pet. The two ways of keeping it alive beyond its years are both extremely tricky, each at this point a Hail Mary at best, and neither exactly extends the life of the pet. One, in fact, is so unlikely as to barely deserve mention. Nonetheless here we go:

"Insights from One Thousand Cloned Dogs" is the title of a recent paper in the journal Scientific Reports. It is just what it says: a summary of what has been learned from cloning a thousand dogs over the last two decades. (Published in 2022, the lag between research and publication means that one thousand is actually closing in on two thousand today.)

You had no idea that dogs were being cloned, let alone a thousand of them?

You had no idea that dogs were being cloned, let alone a thousand of them? Or that any animal had been cloned? Cloning has become an industry, and while the cloning of pets is a small part, it raises issues that come closest to us all.

Cloning has a strange history. Its scientific lineage is straightforward. In the early 1960s British scientist John Gurdon managed to create clones of frogs, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 2012. In typically opaque fashion, the Nobel Committee explained that he had won "for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become
pluripotent."

This brief flurry of fascination with cloning left its mark; cloning has ever since had this eerie mix of threat and promise. There is no evidence today that a human anywhere has been cloned, but for other animals the technique has become widespread. Cloning has produced teams of polo horses, cows that produce more milk and pigs that are meatier. Chinese scientists have even reported using robots to produce cloned pigs more efficiently. And then there are pets.

How did we get to "one thousand cloned dogs"? Ironically it started in 2001 with a cat named C.C. (Carbon Copy or Copy Cat, whichever you prefer). Success in this initial case was hard-won: 87 cloned embryos were implanted into 8 surrogate female cats, resulting in a grand total of one failed pregnancy and one success. While the odds have improved since then, cloning is rarely straightforward.

While the odds have improved since then, cloning is rarely straightforward.

The first dog(s) were cloned in 2005 in Seoul, South Korea. Of the two born, one, an Afghan called "Snuppy" (Seoul National University-puppy) lived for ten years. The other unnamed puppy died after only ten days. Snuppy himself was cloned and three out of four offspring survived.

So dog cloning is solidly established. But why do it? One application has nothing to do with pets. Dogs share something like 350 genetic defects with humans, and from the medical research point of view, being able to clone such dogs would expedite the research into these defects.

But there is also a consumer demand for cloning pet dogs. Barbra Streisand, already famous, became more so with the revelation that she had had her dog Sammie cloned after she died. Sammie was a curly haired (they're commonly straight-haired) Coton de Tuléar, and Streisand really wanted another curly haired version. But because they're
rare, she opted for cloning. She forwarded cells that had been taken from Sammie before she died to ViaGen, an American company specializing in pet cloning. Fifty thousand dollars later, Sammie had been successfully cloned into four puppies. One died, Streisand gave two away two and she kept one. Paris Hilton has also had a dog cloned.

There are at least three issues with having your dog or cat cloned.

There are at least three issues with having your dog or cat cloned. In no particular order they are: misplaced expectations, the ethical issues of the process and the missed opportunity to adopt one of the hundreds of thousands of shelter dogs.

As far as motives go, Barbra Streisand's was not unusual: "I was so devastated by the loss of my dear Samantha, after 14 years together, that I just wanted to keep her with me in some way. It was easier to let Sammie go if I knew I could keep some part of her alive, something that came from her DNA." To her credit, her love of dogs was as powerful as her love of that dog: while waiting for the lab results, she adopted a shelter dog.

Excerpted from The Science of Pets by Jay Ingram, published by Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2025 by Jay Ingram.  All rights reserved.