A woman in Kelowna, BC, deeply saddened by the death of her cat, made the decision to pay $35,000 to clone him to have him alive again.
“It was such a loss for me,” Kris Stewart said of her cat Bear in an interview with CTV News. “You know, it took me a month to be able to talk about it without being terribly emotional.”
Trying to ease her pain, she came across the Texas-based company Viagen Pets, which clones pets from stem cells for a large amount of money. The company exists since 2015.
“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 know is from the movies,” Melain Rodriguez shared, Customer Service Manager at Viagen Pets. “A cloned pet is essentially an identical twin that was born at a different time.”
For Ms. Rodriguez, the principle is similar to “in vitro” fertilization
“We make these embryos in a dish and then put them in a womb, basically with the surrogate,” she explained. “That egg and those cells are fused together and that part is kind of the magic of cloning. The egg is essentially tricked into thinking it has been fertilized by a sperm, but there is no sperm involved.”
If he has enough viable cells, the success percentage is quite high.
The journey has not been easy for Mrs. Stewart. Along with spending over $30,000, she had to keep Bear’s body at the right temperature as she frantically searched for a vet who knew how to biopsy his cells. Once done, she shipped them overnight to a pet cloning company in the United States. But for her, finding Bear is priceless.
“There is no cat like Bear. Honestly, I mean, I’ve had a lot of cats and quite honestly, I never would have thought of cloning any of my other cats, as dear as they are to me,” she shared.