A Florida couple missed their dead dog so much they paid $155000 to have it cloned and shipped to them from Korea. The two became the proud owners of the first single-birth, commercially cloned puppy in the United States.

Born in November in Seoul, South Korea, the 10-week-old cuddly Labrador, clone of the couple’s first dog, Lancelot, was welcomed into his new home by Edgar and Nina Otto. The overjoyed owners picked up their pet at the Miami International Airport Monday night.

”He was a human dog,” Ed Otto, 79, said of the original Lancelot. “He read your emotions. He knew when to be with you and when to leave you alone.”
 
The couple’s 11-year-old dog passed away in January last year from lung cancer, but hoping that pet cloning would one day be possible, the Ottos agreed it wasn’t a bad idea to have samples of his DNA frozen. And right they were.

Last July, the Ottos paid $155,000 in a San Francisco biotech firm's dog-cloning auction. California-based BioArts International is partnered with South Korea’s Sooam Biotech Research Foundation where the dog was born. To create Lancelot Encore, Dr. Hwang Woo-suk took an egg from a female dog, replaced its nucleus with Lancelot’s DNA, then implanted the egg in a second, surrogate dog.

Lancelot Encore joined the couple’s other nine dogs, birds, ten cats and six sheep living on their 12 acre West Boca property.