The panda-dog is a reality. Colombo, named after the Colombo, belongs to a male beautician who lives in Tokyo. Colombo enjoys long city walks, sniffing through the bamboo garden around the corner from his home, and, if the videos on Google offer a clue, giving excessive snout-to-mouth, panda-doggie kisses to his owner.

Colombo is not actually a panda-dog hybrid, but he does represent a bizarre trend. More and more pet owners are interested in owning unique animals. Sometimes this uniqueness is achieved via a creative dye-job, as is the case for Colombo. Sometimes this uniqueness is achieved via creative breeding, as is the case for another dog by the name of Kiko.

Kiko is a Japanese-bred blue Chihuahua who is the product of his dad mating with his dad’s sister, then his daughter, then his granddaughter, and then his great granddaughter. After four generations of unrelenting incest, Kiko is the equivalent of a Louis Vuitton epileather camera bag to the pet-obsessed Japanese populace.

Smaller than the already quite small standard Chihuahua, Kiko’s blue coat fetches him a price of roughly $2,000. Not a small fee considered that one-year-old Kiko is already partially blind and showing signs of mental degradation — she has a tendency to walk into walls repeatedly.

Kiko’s lack of mental faculty is quite common with the new generation of designer dogs that Japan is pumping out with the kind of joyless abandon that can only be found in a culture that developed square watermelons and robotic cats.

However, when dogs are quickly bred with close relatives for many generations in hopes of bringing out recessive qualities, side effects are quite common. Irresponsible breeders have produced litters with pups that have missing noses, malformed legs or exposed spines. These puppies are killed or die before the weaning period.

Specialized dogs are only the beginning. Japan has already experimented with crossing various species naturally, producing one of the first ligons (a lion-tiger hybrid) in modern history. The next logical step is chimeras.

Chimeras are artificially produced by mixing cells from two different organisms. This process can result in the eventual development of an adult animal composed of cells from both donors, which may be of different species. Boring example animals from the past include geeps (goat-sheep) and rouses (rat-mice).

In August 2003, researchers at the Shanghai Second Medical University in China reported that they had successfully fused human skin cells and rabbit eggs to create the first human chimeric embryos. Unfortunately for the rare-breed seeker, ethical codes of conduct forbid the development of the “ruban” past early embryonic stages.

Japanese media has glommed onto the possibility of chimeras and has speculated about the prospect of creating mythical animals. Unicorns, griffins, jack-a-lopes and the like seem in reach to the loaded buyer. For now, animals can only be genetically fused with similar species, but it may not be long before the development of a real panda-dog.

There is something perverse about the synthetic production of new animals. At a time when deforestation and habitat destruction are annihilating the world’s biodiversity, a fascination with producing new animals is disturbing. A griffin, no matter how great a symbol of technological know-how, is no substitute for a tiger.

It is almost as though we have lost our fascination with real unique animals. Growing up watching safari trips on the Discovery Channel and visiting the zoo has left us inured to fish that breath air, octopuses that kill you with a single tentacle and whales with doodles the size of a basketball player.

What a bummer. Hopefully, when these animals go extinct, we will be able to rekindle the reverence for them that currently is reserved only for genetically engineered jack-a-lopes, dinosaurs and panda-dogs.

Jackie Bernstein hopes that anti-tiger organizations contact her with the same vigor that women-haters across the USA exhibited in response to last week’s column on vibrators and feminism. Her e-mail is jaber@stanford.edu.