Cloning the Woolly Mammoth

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Woolly Booger

Scientists from several countries are using the frozen DNA of a long-gone woolly mammoth in an attempt to make a new one.

The problem is this: if biochemistry majors behind thick spectacles build a woolly mammoth (“It’s alive! It’s alive!”), what will they do with it?

The exotic-animal market might take to this scheme. Instead of baby alligators or snakes, the rich and pointless might bring home cuddly little woolly mammoth babies to indulge. But then there is the fear that once the novelty has worn off the owners might flush the baby mammoth down the toilet (I hear the rich have really big toilets, royal flushes), leading to a new category of cheap sci-fi flicks featuring braless federal agents in really tight pants being chased along the sewers of New York by computer-generated woolly mammoths.

Texas Aggies would be tempted to kidnap the critter and cook him the night before the big game with the University of Texas, thinking the woolly mammoth just a Bevo belt-buster special.

There are moral issues in cloning, of course. Scientists with no moral grounding might reproduce Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Dung, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Saddamn Hussein, or, worse, The Captain and Tennille (shudder).

Our present federal regime would surely declare the woolly mammoth an anchor mammoth, and steal…um…reallocate yet more Social Security from the working poor to give the woolly mammoth medical care, a monthly check, and free tuition to any out-of-stone-age university.

The Tea Party, however, would want the woolly mammoth for a reality show featuring Sarah Palin and a high-powered rifle, while the Republicans would hold hands across the aisle and utter such vagaries as “We respect the privacy rights of a woolly mammoth to choose a dignified death because this is a quality-of-life issue. We wouldn’t kill a baby woolly mammoth ourselves, but we understand that others might want to do so.” Cue the default soft-rock Republican convention music.

Few situations are more wake-up-at-0200-screaming-terrifying than woolly mammoths rampaging through the streets or Republicans trying to be cool.


Native Americans can then appear before a federal judge claiming that the critter is “The Sacred Woolly Mammoth of Our People” and should be turned over to the ancient casino authority.

The S.E.I.U. will demand that only they are legally entitled to care for the woolly mammoth, but when they all go out one night to beat up people in the streets the woolly mammoth might die of neglect.

Catholics are a problem too – aging hippies would dismiss the woolly mammoth as decidedly pre-Vatican II while the rad-trad-more-Catholic-than-thou types would bemoan its lack of Latin.

The Chinese will undoubtedly buy up all the available cloning resources and relocate them to China so they could monopolize the world-wide manufacture of woolly mammoths.

Finally, the African elephants and Indian elephants would sneer at the woolly mammoth as inauthentic. Woolly mammoth sympathizers would form Elephants Without Frontiers, one of the many organizations shamelessly profiting from riffing on name of the noble French organization, Doctors Without Frontiers.

Perhaps scientists should leave off trying to clone the woolly mammoth as a wool-of-the-wisp; too many hairy situations and legal hirsutes might arise, and there’s nothing to Rogaine from it.

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