‘I could have a piece of him come back’: The murky ethics of pet cloning

When Venessa Johnson, who’s based in Los Angeles, lost her 17-year-old dog, Oliver, in 2024, she started Googling how to process the loss of a pet. In between the articles on grief, there was one that popped up on pet cloning. “It felt like a lifeline,” she says. “This didn’t have to be finite. I could have a piece of him come back to me.” She spoke to someone at ViaGen, the leading pet cloning company in the US, who told her she had five days to preserve Oliver’s DNA, and that, since he’d already been frozen, there was less than a 10 per cent chance of the process working. Still, that was enough for Johnson. Four days after he passed, she banked his DNA with ViaGen. Less than a year and $50,000 later, her cloned puppy, Ollie, was born. 

While human cloning is illegal in at least 46 countries, including the US, celebrities like Tom Brady, Barbra Streisand, Simon Cowell and Paris Hilton have all cloned their pets. It’s not exactly mainstream – the price point keeps it that way – but there is a growing number of cloned pets being posted on TikTok and Instagram, blissfully unaware that they are part of a heated debate on the ethics of cloning (they don’t even know they are clones). In the comments, people ask owners if they love the clone as much as the original. How much was it? Or, why didn’t they adopt from a shelter instead? As pet cloning gets more attention and becomes popularised in some circles, at least, what does the growing practice say about our own relationship with mortality?

Belle, who goes by Clone Kitty online, is a cloned pet influencer with over 200 thousand followers across social media. Her owner, Kelly Anderson, also used ViaGen to create a clone of what she calls her “soul pet”, Chai. “I use the term soul pet a lot, but I don’t think even that does it justice, because it was an incredible connection that I can’t really put into words,” she says. “When Chai passed at five years old, I felt like I was robbed of time.” She hadn’t considered cloning Chai while she was still alive, but her roommate had mentioned that there was a pet cloning facility 30 minutes away from them in Austin, Texas. She thought nothing of it at the time. Then, Chai passed in 2017, and she remembered the conversation. 

“The vet had frozen her body overnight in preparation to send her to the crematorium,” says Anderson. “I called them first thing in the morning and said, ‘Hold that thought, let’s clone’.” She says she wasn’t trying to bring Chai back to life – she wanted to carry on a piece of Chai with Belle. It cost her $25,000 (it costs double now), which she had to take out a loan for, and it took her five years to pay off the money. Four years later, Belle was finally born. It was an emotionally charged moment. “I hadn’t seen baby Chai since 2011, so there was a big separation in my head,” she says. “I wasn’t seeing Chai again, I was seeing a new kitten, and I wanted there to be meaning behind her, without expecting her to be something she wasn’t.” 

Even as someone who posts her cloned pet, Anderson doesn’t believe that cloning is for everyone. “Getting another Ragdoll felt more like a replacement in my head than cloning her, which was grief logic,” she says. “Cloning felt more poetic, like a continuation of her story. But if you are looking for a copy-paste sci-fi idea of cloning, don’t clone.” It’s nature versus nurture playing out in real time: Belle’s temperament is, according to Anderson, the same as Chai’s, although her personality is different because their early years were. Still, some moments bring back glimmers of memories with Chai. “She would sleep pressed up against my back, and every once in a while, I’ll wake up to Belle sleeping with me in the same way,” she says.

“Getting another Ragdoll felt more like a replacement in my head than cloning her, which was grief logic. Cloning felt more poetic, like a continuation of her story. But if you are looking for a copy-paste sci-fi idea of cloning, don’t clone”

ViaGen frames pet cloning as a preservation of bonds; a story of second-chances where “love meets science”. The cloning process, as outlined on the website, reads simple enough: after genetically preserving your pet (which is recommended to do while they are still alive), ViaGen fuses one of these preserved cells with the egg of a donor female dog, “forming an embryo that grows naturally”. This embryo is then transferred to a surrogate mother, and your pet’s “genetic twin” is born. “This is not just a similar dog in spirit, but a true biological match born later with the same DNA,” it reads. 

With talk of legacy, “healthy” surrogate mothers, the health benefits (including living longer) of the human-dog connection and videos of puppies running through green fields, pet cloning is gaining popularity in the same way that biohacking and the longevity movement are. In a culture obsessed with immortalising ourselves online and attempting to hack our biological clock, we expect our pets to be as worried as us about mortality. Only by spending any amount of time with any animal will you know they are far better than us at living in the moment. Also, we’re already far from securing a standard quality of life for all the animals that already exist with us on earth. 

Lindsay Marshall, an animal science expert with Humane World for Animals, points to the first known cloned dog, an Afghan hound called Snuppy in South Korea, as an example of the number of (often undiscussed) animals in the cloning process. It took 1,095 extracted eggs and 123 surrogates to birth Snuppy in 2005, who has since died of cancer. In modern-day pet cloning facilities, Marshall says little is known about the donor animals and surrogate mothers who are bred and kept as laboratory animals. “Cloning a pet is a very human-centric approach because you’re not considering the value of the animals that are involved,” she says. “Also, the efficiency of cloning is so ridiculously low.” In a 2022 study of 1,000 cloned dogs, scientists found that about two per cent of cloning attempts led to a living puppy.

We do live in a human-centric society, where animals, at least in the US and many other countries, are simply considered property. There is an emerging conversation about animal sentience happening across the world, but it’s still an uphill battle: only about 32 countries formally recognise non-human animal sentience, and animal protection remains low globally. “What does it mean for us to take an individual that has the capacity for subjective experience and agency and simply mass-produce them [through cloning]?” says Philip Tedeschi, the co-director of The Institute for Animal Sentience and Protection. “I don't think that conversation is really being had.” As scientists rush to clone endangered species for de-extinction, Tedeschi fears we may become careless with the extinction of biodiversity on the planet today, believing that, somewhere down the road, we can just bring everything back to life.

Animal rights issues aside, and there are plenty of them, the rise of pet cloning reflects the consumer-driven lens that’s applied across all facets of modern life, including our relationships. “One of the reasons our relationships are meaningful is because they’re not forever,” says Tedeschi. “They are not reproducible.” In Western culture, death has become something to throw the latest science at. Our structural systems simultaneously beget and denounce grief – it’s to be avoided rather than honoured. If grief is love with nowhere to go, as it is so often quoted, it’s little surprise that this is being marketed back to people in the form of pet cloning. “Pet grief is often minimised. After Oliver died, people would text me asking to get a drink when I couldn’t even shower or get off the couch,” says Johnson. “Losing him felt as hard as when I lost my grandparents. He meant that much to me.” 

“One of the reasons our relationships are meaningful is because they’re not forever. They are not reproducible”

There’s another factor to consider when thinking about what cloned pets say about the state of humanity (and the world): the mere fact of bringing a living being into this world with the expectation of it replacing someone else. It’s a philosophical dilemma, and one that Samuel Gorovitz, professor of philosophy at Syracuse University, says is worth weighing the benefits with who the burden of harm falls on, as he does with any ethical choice. “If the goal is to get the pet you loved back, there’s not a lot of benefits because you will never get the pet you lost, and if you are disappointed in interacting with that pet, there’s a good chance it will know it in some way,” he says. “There’s a lot of potential for harm and, even if the benefits did exceed the harm, that’s not good enough if the benefits go to the already privileged people and the harm is inflicted on those already disadvantaged.”

You could say cloned pets are just pets, so who cares? But our relationship with the advancing technology involved in genetic engineering lends itself to other moral conversations, like creating “designer babies” or bringing those obsessed with immortality “back to life”. More so, how we treat the non-humans in our natural ecosystem reflects how we view ourselves in relationship to the world. Nothing is forever, no one is replaceable, and loss is inevitable. The beauty of sharing a life with people and animals is that it is finite. No matter how hard we try to fight it, we can’t update other living beings (or ourselves) like the latest iPhone. 

Johnson doesn’t exactly regret getting Ollie, but she does now see the beauty in having that one special, impermanent relationship. Of having closure. “Some days, I wish I had just let myself go through the grieving process and not be so scared of it,” she says. “I’ve never dealt with death very well, and now, in a way, I’m going to have to go through the process of losing Oliver twice.”