Dog, Inc. by John Woestendiek

Author:John Woestendiek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2010-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

15.

Second Chance

As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.

—Proverbs 26:11

LA GRANGE, TEXAS

March 2005

Second Chance was getting one.

Ralph Fisher, after his cloned bull Second Chance attacked him in 2003, dislocating his shoulder, let bygones be bygones. He was a little more careful around the animal, and hadn’t worked him fully into the rotation for Ralph Fisher’s Photo Animals. But he chalked up the earlier unpleasantness to the bull’s youth, still convinced that Second Chance wasn’t just the spitting image of the original but had the same peaceful soul, too.

Publicity about the cloned Brahman bull—which didn’t hurt Fisher’s company—had died down in the years after his birth in 1999. Second Chance made a handful of public appearances, usually at $1,000 a shot, but always as the cloned bull, never as the gentle one. At each, because of his earlier attack on Fisher, he was kept in a pen and tied to a tree. Fisher, though convinced Second Chance was a gentle beast, wanted to be sure before he started letting toddlers climb aboard for photos.

For the most part, Second Chance lived a quiet, petlike existence, mostly hanging around outside the Fishers’ kitchen window, as opposed to in the pasture with the other livestock, wandering the yard or settling down to snooze under his—and his predecessor’s—favorite tree.

In early 2005, Second Chance almost appeared on David Letterman’s show, as his predecessor had done in the 1990s. It would have been something of a television first, with the show being live but the animal being a repeat. As it turned out, the show had been overbooked, and its staff called the Fishers to cancel. While that plan fell flat, Second Chance did make it on TV two years later, after a crew from This American Life came to town to do a report on the cloned bull. The popular and critically acclaimed Chicago Public Radio program, hosted by Ira Glass, was negotiating with Showtime to produce a TV version. Second Chance was to be part of its pilot episode.

The crew planned to stay for three days to film around the ranch and interview the Fishers. Ralph, folksy and personable on camera, explained what a sweetheart the original Chance was. “He was just like a big bundle of whatever.... Like your favorite dog, he’d lick your face.” When Glass asked him if having a cloned version of his favorite animal around was painful, if it served as a reminder that the first one was gone, Fisher quickly straightened him out.

“No sir, it’s just the opposite, you’re just exactly as wrong as you can be.... So far right now I think we got about 95 percent of him back—the same qualities, the same fun. That satisfies me. That’s better than zero,” Fisher said. “When he [the original] was lying out in that pasture [dead], he was a zero.... We wouldn’t ever have had any enjoyment out of him anymore. There’s a tremendous difference between zero and 95 percent. We were allowed to have most of our feelings about him back.

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