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How would you like your kid to shake a paw with a bioengineered buddy? Not a toy or a robot, but a living animal, genetically engineered to be the optimal pet? Genpets claim to be just that - creatures that look like bald, elfin monkeys and come with a one- or three-year lifespan.

Close examination of the Genpets website reveals, however, that they are not living entities, but rather silicone mock-ups that comprise the final-year thesis of a student at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

This hasn't deterred people from writing to the artist in the mistaken belief that he will take their order. Since launching the site in 2005, Adam Brandejs has had 8,000 breathless e-mails from people writing from countries as diverse as Portugal and Iran to ask how much Genpets cost. Says their creator, "I'd say the demand for a unique pet would be higher than simply a cloned one. People want to stand out and have something others don't. It's human nature."

For the moment, it's still a futuristic fantasy, although genetically modified animals do exist: cats from South Korea that glow in the dark, or the hypoallergenic cats from American company Allerca that start at $6,000. And last month, a state-funded South Korean firm announced that it had successfully cloned seven puppies from a drug-sniffing dog.

Scientifically speaking, the clones are an achievement, no question. Arthur Schafer, director of the University of Manitoba's Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics, notes that producing a healthy animal clone is incredibly difficult - as California billionaire John Sperling knows all too well. In the early 2000s, he spent $19-million in a series of unsuccessful attempts to get his border collie-husky cross, Missy, successfully cloned. Now, South Korean company RNL Bio is offering pet clones for as much as $148,000.

However, Prof. Schafer pays such reports little heed. "The stories about wealthy individuals having their pets cloned are of entertainment value but ... it's so expensive, it's so inefficient ... it's almost a joke that someone would be willing to spend a fortune of money to replicate the DNA of a pet animal," he says. The real profits in animal cloning, he says, lie in other areas.

"I would say that the people who developed cloning technology in Scotland were ... interested in a commercial kind of cloning to make profits," he says, referring to the company that created Dolly, the cloned sheep. "You could clone your best milk cow, your best bacon porker." He sees no difference in a clonal milk cow and a clonal drug-sniffing dog; both are engineered for profit.

Mr. Brandejs concurs. "No matter where this technology advances to, no matter how many good intentions might be poured into it by the people developing it, it'll still in the end pretty much only be used as another quick money maker, and nothing more."

Because the laws governing cloning animals are nowhere near as restrictive as those governing humans, it still seems conceivable that one day we might see the sale of clonal dogs and cats bred to be ideal companions. As it stands, a non-GMO golden retriever puppy from a reputable breeder will set you back $1,000.

"If it were safe, effective and cheap, I don't see that it would be morally objectionable," says Prof. Schafer of cloning, although he talks about the "good reasons" we have to worry about the implications of genetic modification, such as the loss of genetic variety, as has already been proven problematic with monocultures such as banana crops, which stand to be wiped out completely by a single disease.

But, he adds, morally objectionable or not, "it seems criminally frivolous to spend money that way when people in some countries are dying because they can't get access to clean drinking water."

Lisan Jutras is a writer and editor who lives in Toronto with two cats and a small, sensitive street dog.