I just finished reading a news article that says scientists have successfully cloned two cats. This is, in my opinion, about the stupidest thing a scientist, a guy who went to school for somewhere around 18 years, could spend his time on.

From what I can tell, cats, if left alone, have very little trouble making copies of themselves. They actually seem to enjoy it. In fact, at the same time that these scientists were busy trying to make cats reproduce without actually engaging in any meaningful (at least to a cat) reproductive activities, plenty of other people were spending lots of money trying to make sure their cats didn't produce kittens.

The cloning process costs somewhere around $10,000, but for that money, you get an exact duplicate of your beloved pet, with all its idiosyncrasies and character traits. This is a big step up in science. In the 1980s, people who were overly attached to their pets were taking them to taxidermists and having them stuffed so they could display them in their living room.

In the 1960s, when I was growing up, a neighbor lady had her elderly beagle cremated and carried around some of his ashes in a glass vial she kept in her purse. (Even her own kids were somewhat creeped out.)

While we dearly love our scruffy white terrier Harry, I'm not sure that I'd want an exact copy. He is, aside from that guy in the Deep Woods Off commercial who sits in the tent without a shirt, probably the itchiest creature alive.

Harry spends much of his day sacked out on the floor under the kitchen table, so insensible that I am tempted to hold a mirror to his snout to see if I need to fetch a big Hefty bag and a shovel. (I told my wife that we could have saved hundreds of dollars in dog food if we just went on eBay and bid on one of those leftover stuffed canines from the '80s). Because he sleeps so much during the day, he is wide awake all night. And much of that time he spends scratching and biting at himself in our bedroom as we try to sleep.

His problem, we have been told, is allergies. It seems that he has an adverse reaction to just about every substance on the planet. As he's allergic to chicken, beef and eggs, he has to eat specialty dog food containing lamb and rice. He has to be washed with some sort of special shampoo once a week, a hygiene regimen some of my boys can't even come close to. And he has dust allergies, a cruel irony in a house where if you thump a couch cushion, you can't see the TV for 20 minutes.

If you believe the theories of Darwin, thousands of years of natural selection, hundreds of years of breeding and decades of eating stuff out of trash cans should have weeded out every single dog with food allergies.

The problem, of course, is that dogs don't get to reproduce based on how competitive they are. In the dog breeding world, it's not survival of the fittest, it's survival of the smallest, tallest, prettiest or, in the case of my dog, the itchiest. Inbreeding, something that has been discouraged for almost every type of creature except of course the British royal family, seems to be common in dogs.

Other than when I have to pull out my wallet for high-priced exotic dog chow, Harry's allergies don't really bother me during the day. But all night we hear him, scratching and biting in the darkness.

I was against having the dog sleep in our room at all. Kind of an off-white color, he's almost an exact match for the color of our bedroom carpet. As such, he is almost impossible to see in the middle of the night. When I get up to go to the bathroom (something every person over 40 has to do at least seven times a night), I have to shuffle slowly across the carpet, my toes on the lookout. Sometimes, I just stop in the middle of the room and listen for the scritch, scritch, of my itchy canine companion.

Rather than complaining about this situation, I've come up with a plan: First, I'll invest heavily in the specialty dog product industry, buying shares right and left of companies that make venison chow and medicated shampoos. Then, I will set up a home lab and begin cloning my little allergic furball, making thousands upon thousands of copies, each just as itchy as the original.

I hear they're going for $10,000 a mutt.