Nine years ago a pair of newly weaned British Longhair kittens boarded a private plane in Virginia and flew to their up-to-date home in Europe. These kittens were no different from the rest, except that they were created in a laboratory. They were clones: genetically identical to their predecessor, now unfortunately deceased.
It took seven months and cost $50,000, but this 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 appeared, and the waiting list grows every year. Of course. Have you never wished that your pet could live, if not forever, then at least as long as you? Now, in a way, maybe.
WIRED spoke with a longtime customer service manager at the largest commercial pet cloning company. It guides pet owners through the entire process, from sending off a piece of their senior pet to meeting – meeting again? – up-to-date.
Half ours Customers come to us after the death of their pet. They are in mourning. They’re trying to find a way to deal with their grief, so they google “What do you do when your pet passes away?” That’s when they meet us and I’m often the first person they talk to. There’s a lot of emotion. I’m glad I can hold their hand throughout the process because when an animal dies, especially suddenly, many people don’t think straight. Posthumously, everything has to be done very quickly.
After the animal dies, the cells remain viable for about five days. The body should be refrigerated but not frozen because freezing damages the cells. Typically, we would like a piece of a deceased pet’s ear. Ear tissue is resistant; it works very well. People don’t want to think that their pet is missing part of an ear, which can sometimes be a challenge.
Once the sample is in the lab, the first step is to grow the cells in culture from the tissue, and then freeze and store the cells. When everyone is ready to continue cloning, we move some of these cells to our cloning lab in upstate Novel York.
Cloning begins with the creation of 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 basically tricks the egg into thinking it has been fertilized, but there is no sperm in it. This is the magic of cloning. It requires a lot of skill and good hand-eye coordination.
The lab will create several embryos that will then be transferred to one of our foster dogs or cats that are specially bred to be wonderful mothers. After a few tries, we will have a puppy or kitten. Sometimes more than one puppy or kitten, because transferring embryos to a surrogate mother is a bit like in vitro fertilization – more than you can take on. If two or three puppies are born, the customer will receive all of them. On the occasional occasion we have a client who only wants one, so we facilitate place an add-on. Often it’s about the employee. Almost every one of our employees has a cloned animal.