Nine years ago, a pair of freshly weaned British longhair kittens boarded a private plane in Virginia and flew to their new home in Europe. These kittens were no different than any other, except that they’d been created in a lab. They were clones: genetically identical to their predecessor, now sadly deceased.
It had taken seven months and cost $50,000, but that cat was one of the first pets to be commercially cloned in the United States. Since then, a couple thousand dog, cat, and horse clones have followed, and every year the waiting list grows longer. Of course it does. Haven’t you ever wished your pet could live, if not forever, then at least as long as you? Now it can, sort of.
WIRED spoke to a longtime customer service manager for the largest commercial pet cloning company. She guides pet owners through the entire process, from when they send in a piece of the old pet to when they meet—remeet?—the new one.
Half of our clients come to us after their pet has passed away. They’re mourning. They’re trying to figure out a way to cope with the grief, so they Google “What do you do when your pet passes?” That’s when they stumble across us, and I’m often the first person they talk to. There’s a lot of emotion. I’m happy to hold their hand through the process, because when a pet dies, especially if it’s sudden, many people are not thinking straight. Postmortem, things have to be done very quickly.
After a pet has passed, the cells are viable for about five days. The body has to be refrigerated, but not frozen, because freezing damages the cells. Typically we would want a piece of the ear from the deceased pet. The ear tissue is hardy; it works very well. People don’t want to think about their pet missing part of their ear, so that is sometimes a struggle.
Once the sample is at the lab, the first step is to grow cells in culture from the tissue, then freeze and store those cells. When everyone is ready to move forward with cloning, we transfer some of those cells to our cloning lab in upstate New York.
The cloning begins with making embryos from the cells. We take a donor egg, remove the nucleus, and insert one of the millions of cells that we’ve grown. There’s an electric stimulus that basically tricks the egg into thinking it’s been fertilized, but there’s no sperm. That’s the magic of cloning. It takes a lot of skill and good hand-eye coordination.
The lab will create several embryos, then they transfer those embryos into one of our surrogate dogs or cats, which are specifically bred to be great mothers. Within a few tries, we’ll have a puppy or a kitten. Sometimes more than one puppy or kitten, because when we transfer the embryos into the surrogate, it’s kind of like IVF—more than one might take. If two or three puppies are born, the client would get them all. On rare occasions we have a client who only wants one, so then we help place the extra. A lot of times it goes to an employee here. Almost every one of our employees has a cloned animal.
Dogs are very difficult to clone. They go into heat only once or twice a year, and unlike cats, we cannot induce dogs to ovulate. Also, we cannot freeze the embryos. We’ve fine-tuned the litter sizes over the years. We had to figure out how many embryos to put in to get one puppy out. No one wants 10 puppies, even if they love that dog very much.
We have developed a method to put multiple embryos from multiple dogs into the same surrogate simultaneously. So instead of a surrogate giving birth to one cloned Chihuahua, a surrogate could give birth to a litter of a cloned Chihuahua, a cloned Yorkie, a cloned miniature pinscher. The owner doesn’t like it as much, though, because we can’t know exactly which embryos are successful until we see the puppies come out.
A lot of times, I bring the puppy or the kitten to the client. I’ve delivered a puppy to Aruba, to Europe, to Mexico. I’m crying, the owner’s crying.
We have clients from all walks of life. You’ve got the celebrities, you’ve got people that are very wealthy, and then you have your everyday person. A lot of our clients don’t have children. They’re not paying for college tuition or a wedding. Their pet is their child.
For the most part, people don’t want to tell others that they cloned their animals, because they’re afraid of ridicule. Some people don’t even tell their veterinarian. They don’t tell their family. I had a client who told his family he’d adopted a cat that just looked very similar. We like to describe a clone as a twin, only born at a different time. It’s not quite so scary when you think about it that way.
One of the most common questions I get is, “Is the personality going to be the same?” Some people miss their dog, and they want that dog back. I try to prepare them not to expect the same dog all over again. They are genetically linked—and that includes temperament and intelligence and parts of the personality—but the new pet is going to have different experiences. The dog’s not going to know who you are right off the bat. Some owners say it feels like the original pet had a baby. I think people are happy with that.
I have a cloned dog. The original, Zeus, was my husband’s dog. I first met him when he was three. Zeus and I had a love-hate relationship, to be honest. He had some aggression issues. He was stubborn. Anytime I was cooking in the kitchen, he would get right under my feet, and I would bump into him, and he would bite my feet. But he had a very sweet nature when he wasn’t biting. Zeus lived to be 13. We preserved his cells before he passed away. The clone is named Deuce. I’m home with Deuce all day long, so he has bonded with me. I’m his favorite person. The older he gets, the more he looks like Zeus. But Zeus was gray, and I mostly remember him being old and feeble. It’s been really incredible to get to know him again, as a puppy.
—As told to Camille Bromley