CLONING MAMMOTHS
By: Jake Jakubuwski
(Copyright 2012. All rights reserved)
The headline read: “Japan, Russia See Chance to Clone Mammoth.”
I’m not gonna get into an ethics discussion about tinkerin’ around with Nature and maybe even cloning a Mammoth and winding up with something on the order of Godzilla with tusks — and the disposition of Attila The Hun.
But I think those scientific types should leave sleeping Mammoths lay, so to speak. I mean Mammoths have been extinct for ten thousand years, or more. Why would we want to jump start a whole new species of Mammoths?
First off, none of us have any idea how a Mammoth would adapt to today’s world.
You know Mammoths were like really, really big and they ate a lot of stuff everyday. Where’s all that forage going to come from?
Yeah, I know that as kids, we fed elephants, in zoos and circuses, peanuts: but they also ate half a ton of hay every couple of days to supplement the peanuts. And, who’s to say that a Mammoth would even like peanuts or living in a cage with funny looking people pointing and giggling at him?
If this newest Mammoth winds up with any species memory (that’s stuff that is sort of remembered in the genes) he might realize that of all those people looking at him through the bars of his cage — none of them have a spear or a bow and arrows.
Then in his prehistoric angst…
Wait! Would he be prehistoric if he were born in aTokyo, orMoscow, zoo in the next year or two?
Anyway, maybe he gets the idea that he can simply yank the bars of his cage out of the ground and run amuck over all those people crowding around and pointing and giggling at him.
No one alive has ever seen what can happen when a Mammoth runs amuck. Therefore we can only speculate how seriously amuck, umpteen tons of unhappy Mammoth can run.
It would probably redefine the word “Amuck”. Maybe we’d have two definitions. One would be like “amuck” indicating a rowdy crowd of New Year celebrants. Like nothing to it.
The other meaning would be “A-MUCK!”
Like a Sherman tank running out of control in your backyard!
But I’ll tell you what worries me the most.
Nobody knows what will happen. Nobody!
Oh, I know, the scientists think they can remove the nucleus from an elephant’s egg and insert some Mammoth DNA and a year later out pops this cuddly little Mammoth that already weighs two tons!
Scientists (Ya gotta love ‘em) estimate that Mammoths may have reached a weight of about 12 tons. Let’s see: that’s only 24,000 pounds! That equals almost as much as THREE M3 Halftracks (like those used in WWII), weighed!
Listen, folks!
Didn’t these people learn anything from the movie Jurassic Park?
That one movie proves — beyond a shadow of doubt — that it is not nice to mess with Mother Nature. Especially if you’re messing with a really big animal that might not be amenable to potty training on a newspaper. Talking about things running amuck!
Another thing: Have you ever seen a Mammoth tusk?
They are HUGE!
I’m talking huge in the sense that a talented Oriental carver could probably get nine thousand figurines of Buddha out of one tusk! And still have enough ivory left over to carve eight dozen jewelry boxes big enough to hold the Royal Jewels of a fair sized monarchy and a couple dozen of those neat little ivory balls that rattle around inside and ivory cage.
Got that image in your mind?
Now think about this cloned Mammoth, standing maybe as much as fifteen feet at the shoulder and swinging not one, but a pair of those tusks at you!
Why would he be swinging his tusks?
Because: He would be unhappy.
He probably will not like the 21st Century and he will not like the fact that he doesn’t have a mate and his only choices for a soul-mate are some scrawny elephants that would probably be afraid of him anyway.
With all that said, I know that the Japanese and Russian scientists (By the way the word Mammoth has its roots in the Russian language) are probably gonna take a shot at giving the world a real live Mammoth. There just are no guaran-tees that the experiment will have a happy ending.
Think about Jurassic Park!
But before this Mammoth cloning idea gets out of hand, I want you — and especially the scientists that are thinking about messing with Nature — to be aware of something that very, very few people are privy to. Hopefully, this will give those scientists pause…
My father had an uncle who never leftPoland. I never met him but heard lots and lots of stories about him. He became a microbiologist and was the lead guy on the University of Krakow’s team that was trying to clone a human.
Uncle Piotr (“Piotr” is the Polish equivalent of “Peter”) according to family lore, decided to use himself as a donor to see if he could clone a twin. The experiment was successful and the University had scientists from all around the world coming there for symposia and to see the results of their cloning program. Uncle Piotr was very happy.
Unfortunately, the clone began to exhibit some really bad social traits. He would grope female students. He spoke like a Polish sailor and in general was a disappointment to Uncle Piotr. One evening after the clone had tried to force the department’s secretary to go out behind the barn, Uncle Piotr had enough! He got the clone in his car and drove him way up in the mountains and threw the clone off of a cliff!
Unfortunately for Uncle Piotr, two policemen had pulled into the overlook just as Uncle Piotr shoved the clone over the precipice. They arrested him and charged him with making an Obscene Clone Fall!
With the foregoing in mind, and to verify I’m not fabricating the whole thing; here’s a link to the Mammoth cloning story…you might want to read it!
