9 years ago Two newly weaned British longhair kittens boarded a private plane in Virginia and flew to their new home in Europe. These kittens were no different from other kittens, except that they were created in a lab. they were clones. Although he was genetically identical to his predecessor, he unfortunately passed away.
It took seven months to make and cost $50,000, but the cat was one of the first commercially cloned pets in the United States. Since then, thousands of dogs, cats and horses have been cloned, and the waiting list grows every year. Of course it is. Have you ever wished your pet lived at least as long as you do, if not forever? Now you can.
WIRED spoke with a longtime customer service manager at one of the largest commercial pet cloning companies. She guides pet owners through the entire process, from sending part of their old pet to meeting their new pet.
half of us A customer comes to us after their pet has passed away. they are sad. They’re trying to find a way to cope with their grief, so they Google “What do you do when your pet dies?” Then they stumble upon us, and I’m often the first person they talk to. There are a lot of emotions. Many people can’t think straight when a pet dies, especially if it’s sudden, so we’re happy to hold their hand through the process. Post-processing must be done very quickly.
The cells can survive for about 5 days after your pet dies. The body must be refrigerated but cannot be frozen, as freezing damages cells. Usually, you will need a piece of the deceased pet’s ear. Ear tissue is strong. It works very well. Sometimes it can be a struggle because people don’t want to think about their pet’s ear being missing part of it.
Once the sample arrives at the lab, the first step is to grow cultured cells from the tissue, then freeze and store those cells. Once everyone is ready to proceed with cloning, some of those cells will be transferred to a cloning lab in upstate New York.
Cloning begins by creating an embryo from cells. We take the donor egg, remove the nucleus, and insert one of the millions of cells we have grown. There’s basically an electrical stimulation that makes you think the egg is fertilized, but there’s no sperm present. That’s the magic of cloning. It requires a lot of skill and good hand-eye coordination.
The lab creates several embryos and implants them into one of the surrogate dogs or cats that have been specially bred to be great mothers. After a few tries, you’ll probably have puppies or kittens. In some cases, you may need more than one puppy or kitten. This is because when an embryo is transferred into a surrogate mother, it is like in vitro fertilization and can involve multiple puppies or kittens. If two or three puppies are born, the client will adopt them all. In the rare case that a client only wants one, we can help make additional arrangements. A lot of times it gets to the employees here. Almost all of our employees own cloned animals.
