Way back when, I always believed that the big moneymaker of the 21st century would be for whoever could get puppies and kittens to stay puppies and kittens forever. Sure, there would be potential applications for humans – eternal youth, blah, blah, blah, but the money would be in domestic animals. I’m sure someone’s working on it somewhere.
Where we actually are, but which I thought would be much bigger, is the cloning of pets. You could have your childhood pet with you, over and over, until you were an old man. That would be lucrative too, but there is always the nature vs. nurture thing. Your dog is who it is partly by its inherent temperament, but partly because of how it was raised. The odds are good that it would turn out the same way every time, but not guaranteed. There is a company doing this but it is ridiculously expensive and it still kind of has that creepy factor.
But now with genetic science coming on by leaps and bounds every day, I think the next big thing is pets made of the genes of different animals. Imagine, the cute factor of a bushbaby with the playfulness of a dog. Or if your pit bull isn’t quite vicious enough to suit you, add a spoonful of mongoose.
It was however on Fourcast, a sadly now defunct podcast, that they came up with the ultimate expression of this, pets made from the DNA of celebrities and dogs. I would pay solid cash for a cross of Stephen Fry and a greyhound.