He was the runt of the litter, half the size of the other puppies, but he was adorable. Something stirred in Amy Vangemert’s heart, and she decided he was meant to be with her. She named him Buhner after the Seattle Mariners’ right-fielder Jay Buhner and promptly fell madly in love.
“Probably to the point where people would think I’m crazy,” she says with a laugh. “And I’m not crazy.”
The two were inseparable. As Buhner got older, Vangemert got emotional just thinking about life without him. She adopted a rescue dog named Bella and assumed that she’d get another toy poodle when Buhner died.
Then she saw a segment on “60 Minutes” about pet cloning. The technology once reserved for livestock — Dolly, a cloned domestic sheep, made international headlines when she was born in 1996 — was now available to anyone.