The saga of Sir Lancelot lives on.
That's the golden Labrador retriever that Edgar and Nina Otto cloned after their beloved dog died four years ago from cancer.
Now the Boca Raton, Florida, couple have bred the clone, Lancelot Encore, who recently fathered eight pups.
"We are so tickled pink that they were born on the Fourth of July and that she had the litter naturally," Nina Otto said of Scarlett, the West Palm Beach, Florida, female Lab that was surgically inseminated with Encore's sperm.
The Ottos created a website - labraclone.com, "future pups from the past" - to educate others about their cloning journey and to sell seven of the half-cloned doggies, some of which are cream-hued like their father while the others are fox-red, like their mother.
"I am keeping one, and we are hoping to find good homes for all the other puppies," said Otto, who would not disclose the dogs' selling prices.
Traditionally, the owner of the female dog pays a stud fee to breed her.
"We did it a little differently," said Otto, who paid "a few thousand dollars" to have Lancelot bred with Scarlett, a registered purebred female Lab owned by Leigh Green, a Lab breeder in West Palm Beach.
"We needed a female, and there were a lot of people that might not have wanted to use a dog that might not have had a pedigree at the time," she said, noting that Lancelot Encore isn't registered by the American Kennel Club because of his cloned background. But she said she found another kennel club that has agreed to register Encore and his offspring as Labs.
The names of the five females and three males reflect their patriotic birthday: Glory, Liberty, Star, Allegiance, America, Patriot, Independence and Victory. The pups are staying put with their mom until they are big enough to adopt.
"She is a fantastic mother," said Green of Scarlett. "She loves the babies. She wants to take care of them. She will nurse them until the day they go home."
The Ottos have become a media sensation this year. In May, they appeared on a TLC documentary, I Cloned My Pet, in which they discussed the benefits of pet cloning. Last month, they were featured in the HBO documentary film One Nation Under Dog: Stories of Fear, Loss and Betrayal.
Because of their strong bond with Sir Lancelot, whom they described as "a very human dog," they had his DNA cryogenically frozen years before his death. Six months after, they learned of a five-day cloning auction by a California biotech company.
The Ottos joined the auction and won with their $155,000 bid.
Lancelot Encore was born from a surrogate dog in South Korea, where a research firm conducted the cloning procedure.
That dog made the couple the first family in Florida and one of the first 15 in the U.S. with a cloned dog.
The Ottos say the cloned dog is truly a double of his predecessor, exhibiting the same movements and behaviours such as crossing his paw when he sits.
