(KCEN) -- A Louisiana man spent big bucks to get his best friend back.
After his blue tick hound passed away, he contacted cloning experts in South Korea to get the dog cloned.
At first glance Gator may seem like your typical dog, but in reality the hound is a particular pooch.
Gator's owner, Clark Cooper and other vets at his clinic took tissue from Gator's predecessor, extracted, froze and preserved DNA from the sample.
Then he sent it to one of only two men in the entire world who can successfully clone a canine.
Cooper says Gator is special, since he'll be responsible for saving a specific genetic line.
He said, "He's one of a few in a family line that we can't produce so we won't be able to have any more if we can't reproduce him."
If you are thinking about cloning your pooch, Cooper says cloning a dog costs about $100,000 or even more.
It's a bill some say is worth paying for man's best friend.
