Inside the growing business of pet cloning | BBC News

You might remember the buzz over cloning when Dolly the Sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, was born in 1996.

Fast forward two decades and cloning technology has moved on so much that you can now clone your pets.

But, animal cloning is still controversial and critics have raised ethical concerns about the wellbeing of donors and surrogates.

The success rate of a cloned embryo is relatively low and complications during the cloning process can cause pain and suffering to the animals involved.

This video is from BBC Click, the BBC’s flagship technology programme and was made in collaboration with BBC Reel.

Video by Claudia Baxter and Tristan Vince
Executive producer: Camelia Sadeghzadeh
Reporter: Stephanie Hegarty

#BBCNews

[witheringliberal]

Twins aren’t interchangeable and neither are cloned pets. When your dog passes away, it’s gone.

[shinyshinythings]

How sad that people with enough money can now clone pets when there are still so many unwanted dogs and cats waiting in shelters for someone to love them.

[asha]

Instead of taking out a loan, why not get a shelter cat instead?

[ascgazz]

£50k loan to clone a cat.

This takes ”crazy cat lady” to a whole crazy new level.

[krc]

What's next- cloning our children if something happens?
It's a slippery slope when you refuse to let go and grieve properly.

[lambo]

Jesus christ, this is for people that can't let stuff go and can't move on. People die, pets die, people change, things get old.

We seriously need to grow up and change our selfish attitudes towards stuff like this.

[deebarnard]

This is not love of a passed animal, it's self love.

[Choraldiscourse]

Just because we can doesn't mean we should

[daledevernon]

You can clone the physical appearance of the dog but how do you clone the personality?

[richard]

You know somewhere in this crazy world there is a crazy scientist with a cloned human.

[sihr]

Cloning a pet has to be the most selfish act I’ve heard until now

[zainabchahine]

I don't understand why ppl would do that, it's un natural and for me if my pet passes I would prefer to remember them the way they were in terms of personality and looks.

[TheCarlScharnberg]

This is beyond unethical. There are no words. And clones are not your original pet, and never will be.

[GalacticTradingPost]

I thought it was crazy that people would pay a thousands of dollars for a purebred dog and then thousands more dollars its first year to get it professionally trained.
But this is next level crazy.

[Clancydaenlightened]

It may genetically be identical

But the clone wouldn't have none of the memories or past life experiences

So who knows what it's personality is going to be like....

[Froge]

I love all my pets that have passed, but I love getting new ones with different personalities too. This idea of cloning pets is just weird to me

[goyasolidar]

Pets have unique personalities. Even if you clone them, those little idiosyncrasies that made them endearing to you won't carry over.

[iq-ride]

I recently lost my pet. When I started watching I started thinking "what if". As the video went on, I decided against it, especially that that shelters have plenty of pets to adopt.

[martabarbeau]

No matter what you try to do in creating a duplicate, you cannot duplicate a soul, and all animals come from the angelic realm. They are sentient beings. How sad we have arrived at this point. When your beloved pet passes on, adopt one of the many cast aside, unwanted and heartbroken fur babies, and give them a loving home.

[nissanzxtt]

Good god, its getting like that movie " 6th day " with arnold in it with the store "re-pet" where they cloned animals and a secret group cloned people too.