An Australian pet owner spent over $40,000 to cryogenically freeze his dog in the hopes that scientists will one day discover a cure for her terminal cancer.
44-year-old game developer Dale Pearce was heartbroken when vets told him that his Australian Kelpie, Neren, had cancer.
He’d rescued Neren when she was just two years old. After spending nine years together, he couldn’t accept the thought of ending their journey so soon.
Dale Pearce spent $40K to give his pup, Neren, a second chance at life.
Pearce sought answers far and wide, finally coming across the Cryonics Institute in Macomb County, Michigan. The Institute claims it’s the world’s largest provider of whole-body cryonics, saying they offer both people and their pets a ‘second chance at life.’
Cryogenic freezing refers to the preservation of living people (or in this case, animals) at extremely cold temperatures in a sort of temporal slumber with the hopes of resurrecting them years in the future.
If it sounds like sci-fi, that’s because it basically is; at present, humankind hasn’t exactly mastered the technology to keep cells intact after they’re frozen. As explained in a report from Live Science, the human body is 60% water; when that water freezes, it expands, causing cells, tissues, and other bodily materials to burst.
Game dev cryogenically freezes his beloved dog
Despite being over 10,000 miles away from his home in Melbourne, Pearce opted to make the trip with the hope of one day getting to see his beloved Neren again. He brought her with him on a two-week excursion through Australia, Hawaii, San Francisco, and finally Michigan, where she was put down at a vet clinic just outside the Institute.
Preserving one’s pet at the Cryonics Institute is an expensive undertaking; its website explains that freezing dogs costs “$5,800 up to 15 pounds in weight, plus $150 per pound for every pound above 15.” That amount, along with the funds for his trip, added up to $40K… but Pearce says it was worth the expense.
Neren sitting next to a Cryogenic storage unit.
“The ideal scenario is that I am still around in a couple of decades’ time, or I have gone through health span therapies or have also gotten frozen, and then hopefully I’m revived before she gets out,” Pearce told Kennedy News.
“My thoughts about it were split because, on one hand, I was thinking, ‘This might be the last time I see her,’ but on the other hand at least there is a chance, it keeps me going.”
Oddly enough, this isn’t the first heart-wrenching story to come from the Cryonics Institute; in 2017, 57-year-old Gui Junmin made the decision to cryogenically ‘freeze’ his wife’s body there, but received backlash after finding a new romantic partner years later.
