Are Pet Cloners Happy With Their Choice?
I met Princess Ariel and Princess Jasmine on a sunny afternoon at a park in Garden City, New York. The two dogs—both creamy-colored shih tzu mutts with spots on their backs—were lying next to each other on the grass, front legs extended, tongues hanging out. Every so often, they’d both look off to the side at the same moment—then turn their heads back again simultaneously. When two excited little girls came over to pet them, the dogs’ owner—John Mendola, a retired police officer—made pleasant small talk with the girls’ parents. Eventually, though, he shared something that made them raise their eyebrows in surprise: The dogs were not only twins but twin clones, spawned from the DNA of his late dog, Princess.
In 2016, right before Princess died, Mendola had ordered a genetic-preservation kit from ViaGen—a pet-cloning facility based in Cedar Park, Texas—and sent off a sample of her skin to its lab. The company, which opened in 2015, clones dogs and cats for $50,000 and horses for $85,000. Mendola spent several years saving (and sold his car) to afford it, but now here he is with two new versions of his beloved pup.
At least, that’s one way to think of it. A cloned pet is easy enough to define physically: It’s a genetically identical animal, like a twin born on a different date. But its meaning is harder to pinpoint. Is it a continuation of the original pet? An homage to the old one, like a living gravestone? A unique animal that might share some of its predecessor’s best qualities? I talked with several pet-clone owners to find out what they’d wanted—and whether they’d gotten it. For many people, it seems, a clone is essentially an attempt to cheat death, to somehow mitigate the pain of losing a companion. But grief isn’t easily evaded.
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The first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, was born in 1996—but cloning technology has become publicly available to pet owners only more recently. ViaGen, the U.S.’s most popular facility, started cloning livestock and horses in 2002, then expanded to dogs and cats in 2015; since then, it’s cloned close to 1,000 pets, and its customer count is rising. The process (formally known as “somatic cell nuclear transfer”), requires a pet’s tissue sample to be cultured to produce millions of cells, the nucleus of a donor egg to be removed and replaced with one of those cells, and the embryo to be implanted into a surrogate animal, which will give birth to an identical twin of the original pet. Because surrogates are implanted with several embryos, there’s about a 30 percent chance that multiple clones—like Princess Ariel and Princess Jasmine—will be born (though owners can take them all home for the same price).
Pet cloning is ethically fraught. Surrogate animals, for example, have to endure surgery when the embryo is implanted, and sometimes need a cesarean section or experience stillbirths as well. Snuppy, the first cloned dog, born in 2005, was the result of more than 1,000 embryos implanted into 123 surrogate dogs, resulting in three pregnancies that ultimately yielded just one healthy puppy. In 2008, 20 dogs had to be implanted to create one clone of a toy poodle. Surrogates are leased from a breeder; Melain Rodriguez, ViaGen’s client-service manager, told me that all of the company’s customers used to have the option of adopting their clone’s surrogate, but after too many clients complained that their cloned dogs were bonded more tightly with their surrogate than with them, ViaGen stopped offering canine clients the option. Ethicists and animal-welfare activists have argued, too, that cloning is particularly pernicious when millions of animals are languishing in shelters.
And yet, cloning—essentially a very expensive bereavement-coping tool—can be tempting for owners who don’t feel ready to let go of their pet. In a promotional video on ViaGen’s site, Rodriguez claims that clients “don’t ever have to know what it’s like to have them gone.” And plenty of customers take that promise quite seriously: They don’t just want a new pet that reminds them of their previous one. Rodriguez told me that “a lot of our clients will go into it hoping that it’s the same pet all over again.”
There’s no guarantee, though, that a cloned pet’s personality will be the same as the original’s. As with human identical twins, the two virtually always look similar. But the clone will also experience its own unique conditions—maybe a new home, or different family members or other pets around, or even just a different diet. Those factors can shape the individual it becomes. In fact, Brock Bastian, a psychology professor at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, who studies ethical decision making, told me he wonders whether people might be better off saving $50,000 and just buying the same breed again. Rodriguez said that clients are warned not to expect a reincarnation. Still, they’re likely to keep comparing their new and old pets, forever on the lookout for similarities and departures.
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Unsurprisingly for some owners, the attachment they’d had to their initial pet is impossible to re-create. Kelly Anderson, a dog trainer in Austin, Texas, told me that her late ragdoll cat, Chai, first came home with a lot of diseases, so Anderson spent months nursing her back to health, which she felt strengthened their tie. Chai was not a particularly affectionate cat, but in moments when Anderson was depressed, she said Chai would snuggle up to her, somehow seeming to sense her turmoil. She believes that Chai saved her life on numerous occasions. When Chai died unexpectedly at 5 years old, Anderson decided to clone her and named the new kitten Belle.
Belle looks just like Chai—long-haired white fur and bright-blue eyes—but her demeanor is entirely different. Though Chai was always reserved, Belle is outgoing; whereas Anderson nurtured Chai through near-fatal illness, Belle has always been perfectly healthy. Anderson loves Belle enormously and doesn’t regret her choice to clone. But she’d forged a bond with Chai based on very specific experiences: coaxing her out from under the bed when she was scared, gently getting her to swallow her medicine, gaining her trust. With Belle, Anderson told me, she doesn’t feel the same connection. She doesn’t just miss the combination of DNA that was Chai; she misses their relationship, which was built on unreplicable memories and experiences.
Other owners feel like their clone is so similar to their original pet that they hardly need to start over at all. West Westmoreland, who owns a construction company in Jacksonville, Florida, told me that Peanut II, his cloned miniature dachshund, is essentially a perfect continuation of his predecessor, Peanut. Peanut I had been deeply attached to Westmoreland, who’s quadriplegic and uses a wheelchair, and had quickly become his service dog—spending most of her time in his lap and accompanying him to his doctor appointments. When she died after 13 years, Westmoreland was devastated. Several months later, when he brought Peanut II home, the clone took on the same caregiving role as her predecessor. As soon as she could reach his foot pedals and clamber up his legs, she started spending most of her time in his wheelchair, not wanting to let him out of her sight. “It’s like having the same dog,” he told me. “It’s unreal.”
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One possible explanation for this perceived similarity, Rodriguez told me, is “cellular memory,” a theory that memories from the brain can actually be stored at a cellular level, and that those memories are heritable. But it’s also likely that genetically identical animals who are raised by the same owner, in the same environment, could end up displaying familiar behaviors—or at least that owners would interpret their behaviors as similar. Pets are, after all, the perfect object for this kind of projection: They can’t challenge their owners’ assumptions about who they are, what they remember, or how connected they feel to their two-legged family.
However familiar a clone might seem, though, a pet owner’s initial loss isn’t so neatly resolved. Mendola told me he feels that Princess Ariel and Princess Jasmine are like the original Princess “in a new shell.” But still, he misses Princess terribly. Since she died, he hasn’t been able to sleep in the bed he shared with her; he, Ariel, and Jasmine use a different room.
Westmoreland does feel like he has his treasured Peanut—or “P1” as he now refers to her—back in the form of Peanut II. But he also has two new dachshunds, Cleo and Zoe; he adopted them right after Peanut died, but they were nothing like her and, he felt, didn’t fill the void she’d left.
I asked Westmoreland if it was possible that he might have bonded with Cleo and Zoe more had he not been so focused on re-creating a specific relationship with Peanut II. Perhaps, he told me, he would have connected especially with Cleo, hoping she could eventually turn into a good service dog—but now he’ll never know, because he decided Peanut II was right for the position. In fact, Westmoreland is so pleased that he’d consider getting a Peanut III. But if he keeps replacing Peanut with clones, I wonder whether he might be postponing his grief, rather than coping with it.
For some pet owners, having the option of that postponement—of going around their loss, rather than through it—is a comfort in itself, even if they never actually buy a clone. Rodriguez told me that the bulk of ViaGen’s customers have a genetic-preservation sample stored in the freezer (for a fee of $1,600) but haven’t gone through with cloning yet, and may choose never to do so. Rodriguez even has cells from two of her deceased dogs preserved in case she decides to clone them in the future. And the company has cloned animals from cells that were nearly 20 years old—so owners might keep the possibility in the back of their mind for a long, long time.
When I met Mendola, he showed me a video from the day he received Ariel and Jasmine. He’s sitting at a restaurant in LaGuardia Airport—visibly nervous, his hands clasped in prayer—anticipating the arrival of Princess’s clones. They’re brought to him in a carrying case, and as he’s handed the two tiny wriggling puppies, he holds them close while they start burrowing their faces into his chest; he beams down at them, sniffling tears of joy. Mendola remembers asking them, “Do you remember me?” He interpreted their kisses and wagging tails to mean they did.