Perhaps I should start by saying that I have never had a dog I would have wished to replicate. There was Nappy, the poodle-shaped blur of my toddler years. Sweet little Woof, never the brightest bulb in the canine kingdom. Lawrence, the labrador, who barked at suitcases on wheels. My sister's Irish setter, who gathered up the ripest of our unwashed laundry and slept in it. I won't bore you with the rest of my dog-owning history, except to add that I liked all my dogs, toilet-drinkers though they were, mourned their passing -- and trooped cheerfully off to the animal shelter when the time came for a new one.

I am not, in other words, the target customer for Genetic Savings and Clone, a company that offers to store the DNA of your aging dog or cat so that one just like it may someday be cloned for you, at a cost, initially, of about $200,000 each. The company is itself an offshoot of the Missyplicity Project, founded in 1998 when an anonymous couple gave $2.3 million to Texas A&M University so that biologists there might devote their considerable time and expertise to the remaking of the couple's pet dog, Missy. Researchers hope to meet that goal by the end of this year.

In the purity of its self-indulgence and the frivolousness of its purpose, the Missyplicity project is unique. Why invest millions in pet cloning when the world is full of sick children and stray dogs? But in another sense, it is an entirely representative case -- a riveting reminder of the way in which the idea of cloning has been normalized, even cute-ified, in remarkably short order.

Remember how it was just three years ago? In February 1997, when scientists in Edinburgh unveiled Dolly, a cloned sheep, the whole idea of cloning mammals -- and the path it seemed to open to the cloning of humans -- struck countless observers as a hideous portent of science out of control. Writing of cloning's potential for commodifying human life and further depersonalizing reproduction, the moral philosopher Leon Kass warned, "Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder."

Who shudders now? Last month, when PPL Therapeutics, a biotech company, revealed that it had produced five cloned pigs, the story didn't even make the front page of many newspapers. When the Discovery Channel sponsored the thawing of a woolly mammoth -- which scientists hoped to clone -- Larry Agenbroad, a paleontologist involved with the project, crowed: "When people say, 'Why clone a woolly mammoth?' I say, 'Why not?' "His swagger was so convincing that the skeptical biologist who protested that "life isn't something you start and stop like a record. It has to go on in continuum" sounded like a querulous Luddite -- even to millions who had applauded the didactic ending of "Jurassic Park."

"There are theological objections to this work, but the objectors have to back off," Michael Archer, a scientist working on the cloning of the extinct Tasmanian tiger, has said. "This is the way science, and life, is going."

Not all cloning projects are alike, and cloned pigs, it must be said, may someday save the lives of people in need of transplants. And yet, every news account that wallows in porcine cuteness ("the baby pigs playfully wrestled and nibbled on one another's ears at the news conference") or matter-of-factly reports their beneficial effect on PPL's stock price, makes the whole Frankensteinian business seem that much more banal. Every breakthrough in animal cloning makes human cloning not just more technically plausible, but more emotionally plausible. In February, the European Patent Office admitted that it had -- by mistake -- issued a patent that could include human cloning.

It's true that many technological innovations that once seemed disturbingly unnatural -- in vitro fertilization, for one -- have been folded more or less smoothly into the fabric of modern life. But human cloning is different. It would be a quantum leap toward the manufacture of children as consumer goods. And it would introduce a new kind of intergenerational tyranny: who can doubt that a child endowed with -- specifically chosen to have -- a previously used genotype would grow up fettered by parents' Procrustean expectations of how those genes should perform? "It is pertinent to ask," wrote Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell, the scientists who brought us Dolly, "whether curiosity, vanity, the wish for personal power or an undoubtedly misguided desire for immortality really are good enough reasons for bringing a child into the world."

In its own small or maybe not so small way, the Missyplicity Project is the cloning frontier's worst moral offender. That's because it represents the first example of cloning for sentimental reasons, the first attempt to recreate a specific animal, and so feeds the illusion that those we love can be replaced by genetic copies. It doesn't matter that Missyplicity's backers admit a clone can duplicate only a creature's genetic material, not its identity. The fantasy they are playing to is of resurrection. The Texas A&M scientists say they have already been inundated with requests from people whose pet "is dying or got hit by a car or . . . is just getting old." And for three years, Ian Wilmut has been taking calls from grieving parents and others begging him to clone their loved ones back to life. Cloyingly, incrementally, Missyplicity and its ilk make the manufacture of replacement-model humans seem that much more imaginable. And that, I think, is still worth a shudder.