Nine years ago, a couple british long hair kittens The newly weaned children boarded a private plane in Virginia and flew to their new home in Europe. These kittens were no different from the others, except that they had been created in a laboratory. They were clones: genetically identical to its now deceased predecessor.
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. 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.
pet piece
WIRED spoke with a customer service manager at largest commercial pet cloning company. She guides owners through the entire process, from sending a piece of their old pet to meeting their new one.
Half of our clients come to us when their pet has already died. They are in mourning. They’re trying to find a way to cope, so they Google “What to do when a pet dies?” That’s when they bump into us, and I am often the first person they talk to. There is a lot of emotion. I’m happy to hold your hand through the process, because when a pet dies, especially if it happens suddenly, many people don’t think clearly. Postmortem, things have to be done very quickly.
After the death of a pet, the cells are viable for about five days. The body must be refrigerated, but not frozen, because freezing damages the cells. We usually want a piece of the deceased pet’s ear. The ear tissue is resistant; works very well. People don’t want to think about their pet missing part of their ear, so sometimes it’s a problem.
Once the sample is in the lab, the first step is to grow cells from the tissue, freeze them, 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.
Deceiving the egg
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 requires a lot of skill and good hand-eye coordination.
The laboratory creates several embryos and transfers them to one of our surrogate dogs or cats, bred specifically to be good 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 is like in In Vitro Fertilization: more than one can be born. 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 them give the extra to someone else. Many times it ends up with an employee here. Almost all of our employees have a cloned animal.
Dogs are very difficult to clone
Dogs go into heat once or twice a year and, unlike cats, we cannot induce dogs to ovulate. We also cannot freeze embryos. Over the years we have adjusted litter sizes. We had to calculate how many embryos to put in to get a puppy. No one wants 10 puppies, even if they love that dog very much.
We have developed a method to place multiple embryos from multiple dogs into the same surrogate mother simultaneously. So, instead of a surrogate mother giving birth to a cloned Chihuahua, a surrogate mother could give birth to a litter of a cloned Chihuahua, a cloned Yorkie, a cloned Miniature Pinscher. But the owner doesn’t like it so much, because we can’t know exactly which embryos have been successful until we see the puppies come out.
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