The naysayers even point out their own hypocritical elements:

Some researchers think that dogs or cats will be next up for genetic manipulation. Scientists and ethicists agree that gene-edited pets are not very different from conventional breeding — the result is just achieved more efficiently. But that doesn’t make the practice a good idea, says Jeantine Lunshof, a bioethicist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who describes both as “stretching physiological limits for the sole purpose of satisfying idiosyncratic aesthetic preferences of humans”.

Dana Carroll, a gene-editing pioneer at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, adds: “I can certainly imagine resistance to manipulating dogs, even though all of the current breeds are the result of selective breeding by humans.”

Daniel Voytas, a geneticist at the University of Minnesota in Saint Paul, hopes that any buzz over gene-edited pets does not hamper progress in developing gene-editing techniques for alleviating human disease and creating new crop varieties. “I just hope we establish a regulatory framework — guidelines for the safe and ethical use of this technology — that allows the potential to be realized,” he says. “I worry that pet mini pigs distract and add confusion to efforts to achieve this goal.”