England’s II. Elizabeth’s 18th birthday present was a corgi. Her name was Susan, and every one of the more than 30 dogs she has owned in her life since then are her descendants. Great to look at the pedigree of the Queen’s dogs, yes; but what really makes your head spin is to think that this will soon become an even more strange historical rarity.

Let’s weigh in for a moment. From now on, almost anyone can make a clone of their own animal, and it’s enough to imagine that in 30 “Susan” the Queen must realize that there will be consequences.

A beagle, some fur and a lab. That’s what Sinogene Biotechnology, a Chinese biotechnology company specializing in cloning pets, took to create the first cloned arctic wolf. She was born on June 10 in Beijing and her name is Maya. Technologically, it’s nothing very innovative: they extracted DNA from a skin sample of an arctic wolf and placed it in a seedless egg. Later they used a beagle as a “surrogate mother”.

Despite the company’s efforts to “sell” that it is a major effort to save the endangered species, the truth is it is not the arctic wolf. What’s happening is that beyond marketing, there’s something about the world of species recovery: it’s getting easier to clone living things.

Everything we develop. When researchers at the Roslin Institute managed to “design” what the ‘6LL3’ embryo would become on February 8, 1996, no one had any idea it would become the world’s most famous sheep. Neither idea nor much hope: It took 277 attempts to get 29 embryos, of which only one was successful: Dolly.

So even though we’ve been experimenting since the 1950s, cloning was an insanely complex process. 25 years later, it’s insane to be so “easy”, “cheap” and accurate. And as a way to prove it… this cloned arctic fox is a great example.

We are very close to achieving this. In recent years we have indeed seen cloned endangered species: the most famous were the American black-footed marten and the Mongolian wild horse; but without a doubt my favorite project is trying to save the passenger pigeon; a bird that went extinct in less than a hundred years from 3,000 million copies.

Will we see recovered species soon? It really doesn’t look like there are too many technical hurdles. First of all, if we talk about the species that are in danger of extinction; Species with genetic material at hand. If we talk about dinosaurs or animals like that, things get complicated (and a lot).

But the real hurdle is something else: A species is much more than a handful of cells with a given DNA, it’s also a complete ecosystem. Saving unsaved species (without finding equivalent environments, providing them a decent life) is not only an exercise in technological egocentrism, but also a very crude form of brutality.