Clone Ranger Barks again

The winner of the Golden Clone Giveaway - a competition to find the world's most "cloneworthy" dog - has been presented with his cloned puppies.

Trust, Valor, Prodigy, Solace and Deja Vu are clones of Trakr, a German shepherd that with his handler was one of the first to arrive and begin searching for survivors on September 12, 2001 at the site of the World Trade Center. Trakr located the last human survivor rescued from the rubble.

The dogs were cloned by California firm BioArts International, in collaboration with South Korea's SooAm Biotech Research Foundation, directed by disgraced scientist Woo-Suk Hwang .

Trakr died earlier this year. His owner James Symington, a former Canadian police officer, said that one of the clones - Trust - was an exact replica of Trakr.

"The physical similarities are uncanny," he told AFP. "He's the spitting image of the Trakr that I first met in 1995. He has exactly the same markings, the way he moves, everything. Very alert, very intelligent and intuitive." Remember that cloning is not a way of raising the dead.

There are plenty of reasons why you might want to clone an animal - it may be an endangered species, a prize livestock animal, or a champion racehorse - you may want to retain its unique genetic characteristics but doing it to resurrect a beloved companion is a very dubious reason.