A SILSDEN man who crossed the globe to clone his girlfriend’s pet dog is now helping other people follow in his footsteps.

Richard Remde has become the UK representative for the South Korean company that created two puppies from DNA of Laura Jacques’s late boxer dog Dylan.

The two offspring, Shadow and Chance, are healthy and active four years after they were created in a laboratory and brought to term by surrogate bitches.

Richard and Laura brought Shadow and Chance and their mothers back at their home.

The pair hit the headlines as the first people in the UK to clone a deceased dog.

When Sooam Biotech asked Richard to become their official ambassador for the West, he set up Dog Cloning UK.

Richard has plans to help not only dog lovers who want to create genetic twins of their dead pets, but to recreate the world’s service best dogs for emergency services, the military and disabled people.

Cloning a dog is an expensive business: Richard and Laura paid around £60,000 for the creation of Shadow and Chance and the present cost is around $110,000 per puppy.

But Richard said this was money-well spent for animal lovers like Laura, who was bereft when close companion Dylan died.

Richard found an article about dog cloning while waiting in the vets’ where Dylan was being treated.

He said: “Laurawas so devastated after the death of her best friend, I would have tried anything to make her happy again.

“We know our dog companions can be just as important as any family member and losing them can be devastating and hard to come to terms with.”

Richard said there were currently more than 1,000 cloned dogs either living with a family or working as service dogs.

Cloning technology has moved on in recent years, and while Richard had to take tissue samples of Dylan to the lab in Asia, now DNA can be extracted from the urine of living pets.

Richard plans to clone his own dog of 19 years, Max, who recently died, and he will be filmed by American TV channel HBO as he crosses the globe during the along process.

Richard said Sooam Biotech was a non-profit organisation that used cloning as a way of raising money for research into diseases with hereditary links such as Alzheimer’s and cancer, and its work cloning endangered animal species.

Visit dogcloning.co.uk for further information. Richard will soon launch a YouTube video log of his ‘journey with Max’.