Nine years ago, A pair of freshly weaned British long-haired kittens boarded a private plane in Virginia and flew to their new home in Europe. These kittens were no different from any other, except that they had been created in a laboratory. They were clones: genetically identical to their predecessor, now unfortunately deceased.
It took seven months and cost $50,000, but the cat was one of the first pets to be cloned commercially in the United States. Since then, several thousand clones of dogs, cats and horses have followed, and each year the waiting list grows longer. Of course yes. Have you ever wished that your pet could live, if not forever, then at least as long as you? Now it’s possible, sort of.
WIRED spoke with a longtime customer service executive at the largest commercial pet cloning company. She guides pet owners through the process, from the moment they send off a piece of the old pet to the moment they meet – meet again? – the new one.
Half of our Clients come to us after the death of their pet. They are in mourning. They’re trying to find a way to cope with grief, so they Google “What do you do when your pet dies?” » That’s when they come across us and I’m often the first person they talk to. There is a lot of emotion. I’m happy to hold their hands through the process because when an animal dies, especially if it’s sudden, many people don’t think straight. Post-mortem, you have to do it very quickly.
After an animal dies, the cells are viable for about five days. The body should be refrigerated, but not frozen, because freezing damages cells. Typically we would want a piece of the deceased animal’s ear. The ear tissue is sturdy; it works very well. People don’t want to think that their pet is missing part of their ear, so it’s sometimes a struggle.
Once the sample arrives at the laboratory, the first step is to culture cells from the tissue, then freeze and store those cells. When everyone is ready to move forward with cloning, we transfer some of these cells to our cloning laboratory in upstate New York.
Cloning begins by making embryos from cells. We take a donor egg, remove the nucleus and insert one of the millions of cells we have grown. There is an electrical stimulus that makes the egg think it has been fertilized, but there is no sperm. This is the magic of cloning. This requires a lot of skill and good hand-eye coordination.
The lab will create several embryos and then transfer those embryos into one of our surrogate dogs or cats, specially bred to be excellent mothers. In a few tries we will have a puppy or a kitten. Sometimes more than one puppy or kitten, because when we transfer the embryos to the surrogate, it’s a bit like IVF: more than one can take. If two or three puppies are born, the customer will have them all. On rare occasions we have a customer who only wants one, so we help place the excess. A lot of times it comes down to an employee here. Almost every one of our employees has a cloned animal.
