CANDIE - the oldest dog on the planet

摘要

Meet CANDIE. She likes to travel, and, as the oldest living dog on the planet, has visited every continent except Antarctica. It takes a great deal of time to become so well-travelled, especially for a dog. So, how old is CANDIE? It might be hard to believe, but she is over 11,000 years old! Having first walked the earth around the time human hunter-gatherers first domesticated dogs, she is still regularly to be found on streets all around the world. But CANDIE's extreme age isn't her only outstanding feature: she has lived so long that she has even figured out how to be in multiple places at once, a very useful skill for any intrepid traveller. CANDIE figured out how to clone herself long ago and, while she is now all but immortal, there are plentyof scientists, vets and dog owners hell bent on putting an end to her existence.So, what exactly is the price of CANDIE's immortality and why has it turned so many against her? To achieve her extreme longevity and cloning abilities, she had to forego the life she knew. CANDIE had to give up her body and is now relying on mobile life-support to sustain each of her clones. CANDIE's body might be gone, but her intact cells and genome live on. She had to transition from being a free-living dog to becoming a parasite. Those life-support machines she relies on are other, younger dogs andher cells continue to spread globally from individual to individual.CANDIE has become a virulent cancer, her cells spreading from dog to dog, reliant on invading the host dog's tissue to survive, drawing nourishment from their poor unsuspecting victims, While her cells continue to grow and divide, she will never again be a free-living dog. CANDIE is, in fact, an abbreviation of CANine venereal DIseasE. All of these global tumours are directly linked to CANDIE's original tumour and not to the host dogs' own cells.