Best friend 2.0: Pet cloning—should you do it?

When Barbra Streisand posed with her three dogs for a photo shoot for a 2018 cover story for Variety magazine, she joked that it should be captioned, “Send in the Clones.” She revealed she’d had tissue removed from her 14-year-old Coton du Tulear, Samantha, to have her dog cloned. She named the clones Miss Violet and Miss Scarlet after the colors in which she dressed them to tell them apart.

The news created a lot of headlines – and controversy. Meanwhile, pet cloning in the United States has continued to grow in popularity. It currently costs $50,000 to clone a dog or cat with ViaGen Pets & Equine, the only pet cloning company in the United States—and there’s a 5- to 7-month waitlist.

The company has been in business for about 25 years and started by cloning livestock and horses (it costs $85,000 to clone a horse), adding dog and cat cloning in 2014, according to Lauren Aston, business manager at ViaGen Pets & Equine. (In 2018, the company sold the livestock portion of the cloning business to its former “sister company,” Trans Ova Genetics, to focus on pet cloning, she notes.)

“We have cloned over a couple of thousand animals over that 25-year period of time,” she said.

Still, the “vast majority” of clients are people who pay for genetic preservation of a pet’s DNA for $1,600 (plus an annual $150 storage fee) in case they decide to clone their pet in the future.

How pet cloning works

The technology is the same used to clone Dolly the Sheep: somatic cell nuclear transfer. A ViaGen client will order a genetic preservation biopsy kit for their pet’s veterinarian with instructions on how to collect and send a tissue sample via skin biopsy punch from the pet to be cloned.

ViaGen then cultures the cells in a lab in Texas. To clone the pet, the company removes the nucleus of a donor egg and replaces it with the nucleus from a cell of the pet that is to be cloned.

“What we can typically do is implant multiple cell lines into one surrogate mom that will increase the likelihood of having a healthy, successful, full-term pregnancy with multiple babies,” Aston said.

The surrogate animals produce one litter before being retired and put up for adoption, according to Aston. Some clients, like people who sell working dogs to police departments and schools, want as many clones per litter as possible. Other clients only want one or two clones; Aston adopted an 8-week-old German shepherd clone named Vader because the owners only had room at home for one clone.

“You would never know,” she said. “You could find any dog or cat on the street and you wouldn’t know if they were a clone or not. They’re just like any other conventionally bred animal. They’re normal, healthy, look the same, act the same. They don’t have a second tail or a third ear.”

Booming business

Business increased rapidly in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, when many isolated Americans adopted pets from shelters and grew emotionally attached, Aston said.

“They were, for a lot of people, a significant lifeline: companionship and not feeling so alone and depressed,” she said. “But a lot of folks adopted animals that were mixed breeds. They can’t go back to their Lab breeder and get another Lab. There’s something very specific and unique about the genetic makeup of this specific animal that has then driven a lot of those folks to say, ‘Well, when it comes to end of life, what can I do? I can’t get this same type of dog back, or the same type of cat.’ So this is an option for them to be able to at least store the DNA to give them the option should they choose to clone down the road.”

Though now it takes 5 to 7 months to even start the cloning process due to demand, she doesn’t anticipate a major company expansion.

“I think we’re always going to be very boutique, right? Some of that is related to the cost, and some of that is just related to people’s opinions of how they feel about this technology,” she said. “It’s never going to be a mainstream option for folks.”

Clients are predominantly based in the United States, though “a large chunk” are international, according to Aston.

Surrogates—some from shelters, some purpose-bred—live in a biosecure facility with an animal care team and staff veterinarians. After producing a litter, the surrogates stay with the puppy or kitten clones for about 8 weeks for nursing and weaning, she notes.

“It’s very important that they are very well-socialized and cared for, because then that’s going to make them a better mama,” she said. “As you can imagine, if somebody’s spending $50,000, they want to make sure not only that their kitten but also the mom is very well cared for and of the utmost health.”

Beyond clones

Meanwhile, the company has worked with zoos to clone endangered species, like two Przewalski’s horses for the San Diego Zoo dubbed Kurt and Holly.

“What a lot of people don’t know is that worldwide, zoos as a whole have been storing DNA of the animals at their zoo for a very long time. They call it their ‘frozen zoo,’” she said, noting that the DNA for the Przewalski’s horses’ was collected and stored over 40 years ago.

ViaGen recently began offering intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) and sexed semen for equine clients, which is becoming “extremely popular,” according to Aston.

“Basically that is allowing you to choose the sex of the offspring that you’re trying to reproduce,” she explains. “With ICSI, it’s really a great tool to use for, let’s say, folks that have a stallion that cannot reproduce anymore. We can go ahead and freeze straws of semen to then be able to create embryos from and help extend their breeding programs. So those two services are really up-and-coming in the equine space.”

Ethical considerations of pet cloning

To be sure, pet cloning raises not just eyebrows but ethical considerations for many animal welfare organizations, rescue advocates and the general public.

For instance, the ASPCA’s position statement on pet cloning includes a call for a “moratorium on the research, promotion and sale of cloned and bioengineered pets” while a multidisciplinary commission can be established to investigate practices and potential “ethical consequences.”

Philip Tedeschi, LCSW, founder and director emeritus of the University of Denver’s Institute for Human-Animal Connection and co-director of the Institute for Animal Sentience and Protection, is concerned that USDA standards and animal welfare requirements for research industries that include animals are “largely problematic.”

“The USDA standards and animal welfare practices on research animals, in many cases, is really not protecting those animals’ quality of life at any level,” he said. “These industries are built around and have to protect the concept that the animal is property. I think we should be very careful and resist the urge to just simply treat animals as toaster ovens or couches or other things that we move around or buy or purchase or trade at will.”

The urge to clone a beloved pet as part of anticipatory grief highlights the strong bonds humans can develop with dogs and cats and the heartbreak that accompanies their loss. Tedeschi believes people often have relationships with animals that are some of the most “reliable and important” in our lives, so their death can be more excruciating than that of a human family member.

He feels cloning a pet could be a barrier to finding healthy ways to cope with their loss and discovering why the relationship was so meaningful—and not reproducible. A clone might look identical to the original animal, but won’t share the same personality, memories or experiences.

“What makes these relationships special and unique is the fact that these are individuals with their own unique personalities, and they fit into our lives in a lot of different ways that make those moments special,” he said. “We actually transition through that lifespan with them, and we’re changing through that process as well. So the idea that somehow, we are going to recreate that experience is also kind of a faulty premise from just a purely developmental perspective.”

The animal shelter alternative

Another ethical consideration surrounding pet cloning is the huge number of adoptable pets euthanized in animal shelters each year, according to Tedeschi.

In 2024, over 748,000 dogs and cats had a “non-live outcome,” according to Tori Fugate, director of communications for Shelter Animals Count, a nonprofit that maintains a database of U.S. sheltering statistics. (Fugate emphasizes that as a 501(c)3 organization, the nonprofit is neutral and doesn’t have a position on pet cloning.)

“What we’re seeing now is that dogs of all sizes are spending more time in shelters than they were when we look at pre-pandemic levels,” she said. “The length of stay for dogs has almost doubled by all dogs’ sizes—small, medium and large—when we compare it to 2019. Large dogs on average are spending 21 days in shelters now.”

Economic challenges are helping fuel the “shelter crisis,” so Fugate notes that often for a few hundred dollars, people can adopt a shelter dog or cat, which typically includes vaccinations, microchipping and spay/neuter surgery.

She understands how “devastating” the loss of a beloved pet can be.

“I encourage anybody, if they’re looking for that similar love, to just go walk the kennels at your local shelter, wherever it is, because there’s going to be a pet there that is just waiting for you,” she said. “There’s going to be a pet that’s going to make an impact in your life, and you can definitely make an impact in theirs. You’re going to save that life.”

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