Adventures in canine cloning

The original, authentic, never-duplicated, one-of-a-kind, accept-no-substitutes Aquinnah

My wife Liz and I like to travel with our pups whenever possible, but when we took a short out-of-state trip recently, we boarded Aquinnah and Martha at a kennel. It would have been impractical for them to tag along this time around.

On our way home the next day, we stopped at the kennel to pick up the guys. Martha, a pit bull/lab mix, was her usual self, but chocolate lab Aquinnah (aka Quinn), who always is well-behaved in the car, was out of control. Although he normally sits quietly in the back seat, he jumped onto Liz’s lap in the passenger seat up front, and refused to budge during the drive to the house.

Once we got home, Quinn ran around the house as if he’d never seen it before, gulping water and chomping biscuits with impunity.

He almost got into a fight with grumpy cat Walter, whom he normally has the good sense to avoid. He had to be coaxed down from the second floor, even though he never has any trouble negotiating stairs. Whenever he approached Martha to give her a doggie poke and a sniff, she yipped, which was something new as well.

It was hard to get a good look at Quinn during all of this because he was racing around the house at warp speed. But when he finally settled down a bit, we got a chance to check him out more closely.

Quinn was the right size, color and build. As befits a neutered dog, he was missing certain manly attributes. He looked like himself, but a few things seemed amiss. He was a bit too fluffy. His ears were slightly oversized. And a pimple on his snout had mysteriously disappeared.

As the clues mounted, Liz decided to call the kennel. Before she could do so, the kennel called us.


“I have an odd question to ask you,” the woman on the line said. “Did we give you the wrong dog?”

Unlike mutts, who each have a distinctive look, purebred chocolate labs can be amazingly similar in appearance, but their unique quirks give them away - eventually. Here was a case in point. We brought the accidental imposter back to the kennel and traded him in for the original, never-duplicated Quinn.

Martha and the cats seemed relieved to have the real deal in residence once again, but as pleased as they were, Liz and I were 100 times happier.