Pet cloning is on the increase in China, as grieving owners turn to science to try to bring their furry friend back from the dead.
An idea once "confined to the pages of science fiction", pet cloning is now an "established business" in the country, "fuelled by deep emotional attachments, advancing biotechnology" and a booming pet market, said The Independent.
'Genetically identical twin'
In China, "losing a beloved pet" is "increasingly becoming not the end of a beautiful friendship", but "the start of something almost as good", said the South China Morning Post.
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Pet cloning "preserves all the unique traits that made your dog irreplaceable", including "temperament, intelligence, and physical appearance", Sinogene, one of the industry's market leaders, says on its website.
All you need to clone your pet is a tissue sample. DNA extracted from these cells is "inserted into a donor egg" and the resultant embryo "implanted into a surrogate mother", said The Independent. This means a "genetically identical twin" can be born "months – or even years – after the original pet has passed away".
The process doesn't come cheap – typical fees range from £15,000 to £30,000 – and animal rights activists have called it "cruel" and "unethical", claiming that each surrogate mother undergoes "unnecessary suffering". But that doesn't seem to be stopping the increasing demand for cloned pets.
'Twice as many pets as toddlers'
Behind the popularity of the pet cloning in China are two clear recent trends. First, the relationship between Chinese people and their pets has changed. Pets' main role used to be "guarding homes", Liu Xiaoxia, a pet industry expert, told Global Times. Now, they are valued for "emotional interaction and companionship" and have "a deeper integration into people's daily lives".
And that's led to the second trend: a surge in pet ownership. Millions of Chinese people got a pet during the pandemic, and figures suggest that, by 2030, there will twice as many pets in China as toddlers. There is now a booming industry "to pamper them", said Bloomberg, with 4.7 million pet-related companies in the country, up by almost 50% in the past 12 months alone. It's a market already worth ¥300.2 billion (£32 billion), said Global Times, and forecast to reach ¥400 billion (£42.6 billion) by 2027.
And, as those pandemic-purchased pets age, pet cloning looks set to become an increasingly profitable part of this sector. A Goldman Sachs report calculated that 28% of pet dogs in China are more than seven years old, and about 10% of cats are more than eight years old, said the Financial Times. That means "millions of cats and dogs are entering old age".
Could pet cloning take off in the UK? Cloning animals is banned here, except for research purposes. But there is a company in Shropshire that gets around this by freezing the tissue samples and sending them to the US for the cloning process, before "a twin of the original animal" can be brought back to the UK, said The Guardian.
