A Boca Raton couple has welcomed a new puppy into their household recently.  Well, sort of a new puppy.  The pup is a clone of their yellow Lab Lancelot, who died at 11 of cancer.  Ed and Nina Otto spent just over $150K to have their dog cloned by the Bay Area company BioArts, who sent Lancelot’s DNA to South Korea.  Lancelot Encore was born 10 weeks ago, the result of inserting Lancelot’s DNA into the egg of a Korean dog, then inseminating another Korean dog with the fertilized egg.

While this all may sound like something out of a sci-fi movie, the puppy is alive and well and has just moved home to Florida.  The Ottos have 9 other dogs and 2 cats; no word on whether any of the other pets have told Lancelot Encore of his unusual beginnings, but if “Charlotte’s Web” and “Babe” have taught us anything, it’s that there’s always That Guy in the group who’s gonna give the new kid a hard time with a harsh dose of reality.  Then again, they say that dogs live in the present.

Interesting from our end is that we have a number of cloning t-shirts and anti-cloning t-shirts, and we even some designs that deal specifically with cloning dogs.  And that of course means that someone out there created some cloning Dog T-shirts, giving Lancelot Encore and any future cloned pups to come a lot of nice wardrobe choices.

And so it is that Lancelot Encore becomes the first dog, cloned or otherwise, to win a Fantasy T-Wearer award today.  May he enjoy the Superclone dog shirt at right.  (We don’t know how the rest of the pack feels, but we’ll go out on a limb and assume that at least one of the cats would rather put him in a different outfit.)

While cloning overall raises a lot of controversial questions, we’ll leave you with this puzzler: if a cloned dog chews up the furniture, who’s fault is it?