People spare no expense when it comes to their pets, and while most dogs and cats live anywhere from 12 to 15 years, many pet owners would pay thousands of dollars to prolong the lives of their furry friends.
Enter cloning.
In 1996, a successful cloning test resulted in the birth of Dolly the sheep, the world’s first cloned mammal. Since then, cloning has gone from livestock to dogs and cats. ViaGen, a Texas-based firm, originally purchased the intellectual property technology in 1998 to improve livestock breeding.
A new BBC feature that discusses the advancements in cloning since the birth of Dolly reveals that cloning was initially used to “bypass the genetic lottery.” Now, pet owners want to use the technology to save their pets, and ViaGen realized they could charge a substantial fee for the service.
ViaGen charges pet owners $1,600 to preserve the cells of a single pet. If the pet owner decides to go through with cloning their pet, the year-long process costs $35,000 per cat and $50,000 per dog. According to the cloning company, many pet owners pay to have their pet’s cells stored, hoping they can afford to have them cloned later in life.
According to CheMyong “Jay” Ko, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s comparative biosciences department, the cloning process is simple.
Ko told The Washington Post it starts with taking tissue from the pet’s ear or stomach. The tissue is combined with enzymes in a lab to extract the DNA.
Scientists then retrieve an unfertilized donor egg from another animal, and a tiny needle is used to remove the egg’s nucleus, which is then swapped with the nucleus of the pet’s cells. The new egg carrying the pet’s DNA is mixed with nutrients usually found in the uterus and cultured until it becomes an embryo, which scientists can then place in the donor animal.
Obviously, like in in-vitro fertilization, there is not a 100% success rate, and the cloned animal may not survive to or through birth.
“Because cloning is not a natural process, there can be abnormalities in the embryos that lead to miscarriages or death just after birth,” Ko said.
For Kelly Anderson, it was a chance worth taking after her 5-year-old cat, Chai, died. Chai passed away after swallowing a wrapper that got lodged in her intestines, and Anderson turned to ViaGen.
Anderson wanted a clone of Chai because the cat had helped her during a difficult bout of depression. Five years and about $25,000 later, Chai’s clone was born.
Belle is essentially a carbon copy of Chai, and while she shares the same blue eyes, snow-white fur, and love of stretching out to sleep against Anderson’s back, Belle is a different cat from Chai.
“Even though they’re different cats, there’s still a piece of Chai in her. So it’s comforting in a way that I don’t really know how to explain,” Anderson told The Washington Post.
While there are some ethical concerns with cloning, such as the chance of several pets dying during the cloning process, many see cloning as a way to continue the deep attachment they had with their beloved pet.
Robert Klitzman, director of the master of bioethics program at Columbia University, explained to The Washington Post there is a naive notion that the relationship someone has with a cloned animal will be the same as the one they had with the deceased pet.
“I can either pay thousands of dollars to create a new pet that’s actually going to have a different history and personality,” he said. “Or maybe I could adopt an animal that would otherwise be killed in a shelter. Those are things that ethically need to be considered.”
Still, ViaGen and similar companies in Singapore and China are gaining traction in the pet cloning business, with celebrities such as Barbara Streisand and Diane von Furstenburg cloning their pets.
Von Furstenburg had her late dog cloned back in 2016, and Streisand had her dog cloned twice by ViaGen in 2018. TV personality Simon Cowell has also expressed interest in having his puppies cloned in 2019, although there has been no further news of Cowell cloning his pets since then.