Two South Korean labs are offering pet owners the chance to clone dogs, but for those looking to bring back a beloved beagle, be ready to wait in line and have plenty of cash on hand.The Seoul-based labs - one affiliated to RNL Bio Co and the other to Sooam Biotech Research Foundation - are separated by about 30 km (20 miles) and bill themselves as the only places in the world where you can clone a cocker spaniel or retrieve a retriever, with costs running at about $50,000 to $100,000.But the labs are turning out far more copies of working dogs and endangered breeds than pets.

Customers such as South Korea's customs service have cloned a champion sniffer dog, seeing the option as a cost-effective way to produce candidates for expensive training programs. The customs service estimates the cost at 60 million won ($60,260) per clone. It costs about twice that to breed and train a normal sniffer dog, but only about 30 percent are good enough to make the grade, it said.

RNL, a biotech firm using dog cloning as a way to grow its international business, will soon produce its first cloned pet, copying a pit bull named Booger for a California grandmother who lost a few of her fingers and relied on the dog for help. Dogs are cloned using so-called somatic cell nuclear transfer, a technique for hollowing out the nucleus of a donor egg and injecting it with the donor's genetic material, which is typically skin tissue taken from the ear.

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