nine years ago, A pair of newly 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 had been created in a laboratory. 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 commercially cloned pets in the United States. Since then, a couple thousand clones of dogs, cats and horses have followed, and each year the waiting list grows. Of course. Have you ever wished that your pet could live, if not forever, then at least as long as you? Now you can, more or less.
WIRED spoke with a veteran customer service manager for the largest commercial pet cloning company. She guides pet owners through the entire process, from shipping a piece of the old pet to meeting (reuniting?) 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 the grief, so they Google “What do you do when your pet dies?” That’s when they run into us and I’m often the first person they talk to. There is a lot of emotion. I’m glad to walk you through the process, because when a pet dies, especially if it’s sudden, many people don’t think clearly. Post mortem, things must be done very quickly.
Once a pet has died, the cells are viable for about five days. The body should be refrigerated, but not frozen, because freezing damages cells. Normally we would want a piece of the deceased pet’s ear. Ear tissue is tough; works very well. People don’t want to think that their pet is missing part of their ear, so sometimes that’s a struggle.
Once the sample is in the lab, the first step is to grow cells from the tissue, then freeze and store them. When everyone is ready to move forward with cloning, we transfer some of those cells to our cloning lab in upstate New York.
Cloning begins with the creation of embryos from cells. We take an egg from a donor, remove the nucleus and insert one of the millions of cells we have grown. There is an electrical stimulus that basically tricks the egg into thinking it has been fertilized, but there is 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 and then transfer them into one of our surrogate dogs or cats, who are specifically 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 mother, it’s kind of like IVF: more than one may be needed. If two or three puppies are born, the client would keep them all. On rare occasions we have a client who only wants one, so we help place the extra. Many times it ends up with an employee here. Almost all of our employees have a cloned animal.
