Cloning Animals: Pet Owners Paying More Than $50,000 To Clone Dogs, Cats

Just about everyone has lost a pet at some point in their lives. Some people choose to get a new pet shortly thereafter to replace the animal-shaped hole in their hearts, but even if the new pet is fantastic, it can never be the same. Thanks to advancements in cloning technology, you can now come closer than ever to bringing your beloved cat or dog back to life. Whether or not that is horribly creepy is up to you.

CBS has a fascinating story out of Pittsburgh of how far pet cloning has come since the technology rose to prominence with Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996. In case you do not remember the Dolly phenomenon, she was a sheep successfully cloned from the DNA of another sheep. Dolly lived for more than six years before developing a fatal lung infection, which led to skepticism about the entire process.

More than two decades later, however, people are taking advantage of this technology to bring back everyday household pets. CBS highlights a 9-month-old toy poodle named Baxter, who was created from the DNA of another dog by a company called ViaGen. According to the story, Baxter is completely indistinguishable from a regular 9-month-old dog.

Unfortunately, this is not something most people are going to be able to afford for quite some time. The going rate to bring back (in a sense) your deceased pet is $50,000. By comparison, your local animal shelter probably has free or discounted adoption events on a regular basis. You do the math.

Baxter was not brought back to life with futuristic science fiction cloning chambers or anything like that. Instead, he was created using skin samples from the previous dog. The samples were then sent to ViaGen Labs in Texas, where they were used to culture cells, or artificially grow them in a contained environment. After several million cells were cultured, they were placed into an egg cell, which was then put into a surrogate mother.

The new Baxter was then born like any normal dog, a physically and genetically identical twin to his predecessor. According to CBS, this whole process takes “six to seven months” to return a cloned puppy. For those with the financial means to make this happen, it is probably worth the wait to bring back a deceased pet they loved for years.

Of course, it is not the same dog or cat as the one who passed away; it is merely a twin. As CBS points out, part of the reason this is appealing is that unique mixed-breed dogs that might be difficult to find normally can be replicated using this technology. That means if you have a soft spot for your old dog’s special mixed heritage and 50 grand lying around, you can get a new one much more easily than before.

Twenty years after Dolly, this technology is becoming more efficient and more accessible to people who want to keep an animal in their lives for any reason. Only time will tell if it ever becomes affordable enough to be a preferred solution for animal lovers everywhere.