Little Nicky, Cloned Kitten
Dec. 27, 2004 — The world's first commercially cloned pet, a nine-week-old kitten, was delivered to a woman who paid $50,000 for a copy of her beloved dead cat, said U.S. company Genetic Savings and Clone on Thursday.
"Little Nicky: was handed over to a Texas woman known only as Julie on Dec. 10, making her the first paying client to receive a genetically-cloned pet, Genetic Savings and Clone said.
Julie had asked the San Francisco-based company to make her a cat just like Nicky, her beloved pet of 17 years, who died in September 2003.

"Little Nicky is the world's first commercial pet clone," Ben Carlson, a spokesman for the first commercial pet cloning company, told AFP.
"This is a huge milestone. We're so happy, and Julie is absolutely thrilled," he said as Little Nicky settled into her new home. "She was truly stunned by his resemblance to her late pet," Carlson said.
The kitten, cloned using skin tissue removed from Nicky by Julie's vet, was born in October. Genetic Savings and Clone produced two other kitty clones this year, which it uses as showroom models.
"I see absolutely no differences between Little Nicky and Nicky," Julie, an airline industry worker, was quoted as saying by the firm.
"When Little Nicky yawned, I even saw two spots inside his mouth, just like Nicky had," she said of the cat who was born in the Texan city of Austin.
"Little Nicky loves water like Nicky did, and he's already jumped into the bathtub like Nicky used to do."
The bereaved owners of four other dead moggies have already coughed up $50,000 a piece for their own "copy cats," which are currently in production and should be delivered next year, Carlson said.
The company is planning to produce a total of nine cloned-to-order cats, three of which will be kept by the firm to show off as showroom models.
"We can't bring a pet back to life, but we can produce one that looks like your original cat," Carlson told AFP.
The company's chief executive officer Lou Hawthorne said the copy cats were more than just physical dead ringers.
"Our clients expect healthy clones with a strong physical resemblance to their donors, but they also hope for behavioral similarities as well," he said.
Genetic Savings and Clone was formed in 2000 after the birth of the world's first cloned animal, Dolly the sheep, in 1996.
After unsuccessfully launching into dog cloning, the firm announced in February 2002 that it had achieved the world's first cat clone: a feline called "CC," or "Copy Cat," who was born at Texas A&M University.
The length of the cloning process, which involves producing an embryo and transferring it to a surrogate mother, usually takes between five and seven months for a cat, Carlson said.
But while Julie may be thrilled to have won a new lease on life for her cat Nicky, virulent criticism of what some have called "Frankenstein-like" pet cloning has dogged the company.
"The whole premise of this operation is morally highly problematic," Professor David Magnus, co-director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at California's Stanford University, told AFP.
"There is no good reason to do this when millions of pets have to be euthanized each year because they do not have homes, and when this process carries unknown health risks to the animal," he said.
Cloned animals may have shortened lifespans, Magnus said, pointing to the fact that Dolly was put down in 2003 because she developed an incurable respiratory disorder.
And even if the pets do live, people like Julie are "not getting what they think they're getting" when they have their cats cloned, Magnus said.
"These people are really having trouble accepting that death is a natural part of life and want an animal just like the one that died — but animals, just like humans, are more than just their genes."
But Carlson said much of the criticism — including charges that pet cloning is hard to justify with so many thousands of unwanted animals unclaimed in homeless shelters — was unfounded and based on misunderstanding.
"Our clients are looking for something that is not available in a pet shelter; they are looking for a specific genetic endowment," he said. "That's why they come to us."
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