B.C. woman spending US$35K to clone beloved cat so he can 'live forever'

When Kris Stewart’s beloved cat Bear was recently struck and killed by a car, she was heartbroken.

“It's been such a loss for me,” the Kelowna, B.C., woman told CTV News. “You know, it's taken me a month to just be able to talk about it without being terribly emotional.”

But in her grief, the pet owner also found determination. Stewart quickly began making arrangements to have Bear cloned.

She described the five-and-a-half year old ragdoll cat as extraordinarily smart.

“I want to make sure that his genetic makeup continues to live and breathe,” Stewart explained. “This is what I'm hoping for: to kind of make Bear live forever.”

She had to store Bear’s body at the right temperature while she frantically looked for a veterinarian who knew how to perform a biopsy to collect his cells. Once that was done, she shipped them overnight to a pet cloning business in the United States.

“That was the tricky part, just making sure that they got the cells in perfect condition – and they did,” Stewart said. “I was relieved.”

Fortunately for her, Stewart had already researched animal cloning prior to Bear’s sudden death, when her dog was battling cancer years ago.

“I tried to clone my cocker spaniel’s cells then but the cells weren't viable; there was a storage issue," she explained.

In Bear’s case, however, Viagen Pets confirmed it received roughly four million viable cells – enough to clone the cat.

Melain Rodriguez, client service manager with Viagen Pets, said the company has cloned fewer than a thousand pets since it started in 2015, and only a handful of their customers have been from Canada.

“I think when people hear the word cloning, it can be a scary word because they just don't know much about cloning, or what they do know is from the movies,” she said. “A cloned pet is just essentially an identical twin that is born at a different time.”

Rodriguez likens the process to in-vitro fertilization, something more familiar to most people.

“We are making these embryos in a dish and then putting them into a womb, essentially with the surrogate,” she explained.

The company uses an egg from a donor animal and removes the nucleus, then adds the millions of cells from the pet’s biopsy.

“This egg and cells are fused together and that part is sort of the magic of cloning. The egg is essentially tricked into thinking that it's been fertilized by a sperm, but there's no sperm involved,” she explained.

Rodriguez said if they get enough viable cells, the success rate is very high.

If the pregnancy doesn’t happen right away, they will make another egg transfer until it is successful. A full refund is offered if there isn’t a successful pregnancy.

To clone a cat costs US$35,000, and a cloned dog costs US$50,000.

But to Stewart, having Bear back in her life is priceless.

“There's no cat like Bear. Honestly, I mean, I've had many cats and quite honestly, I would never have thought of ever cloning any one of my other cats, dear as they were to me,” she said.

“This is a viable thing. It really can happen if you've got access to some quick capital and you have a cherished pet, you can make this happen for yourself, too”