A woman has made headlines after opening up about having her ‘soulmate’ pet cat cloned following the animal’s death.
32-year-old Kelly Anderson from Texas appeared on ITV’s This Morning to explain what led her to spend a small fortune on cloning her cat, Chai.
As Anderson revealed, Chai died in 2017 when she was just five years old. The woman went on to recall feeling devastated and heartbroken as she described the cat as “the closest thing to a soulmate.”
“I lost her very young, so when she passed I remembered a conversation I had with my roommate about cloning and I reached out to ViaGen Pets. Belle came into my life just last year,” she said.
Following the decision to have Chai cloned, Anderson paid $25,000 on making sure her new companion will have the same DNA as her deceased friend.
The procedure was carried out by ViaGen Pets, a TransOva Genetics division, which has been cloning pets like dogs and cats for the last three years after nearly two decades of cloning livestock and horses.
As part of the procedure, the owners have to provide skin samples that contain their pets’ DNA. The samples are then placed in an incubator that encourages the growth of cells.
After the cells are harvested and preserved in liquid nitrogen tanks, the company looks for a donor egg. Once the nucleus of the donor egg is safely removed, it is replaced by the cells containing the DNA of the deceased animal.
The last step of the process involves implanting the embryo into a surrogate animal that eventually gives birth to an animal that is genetically speaking identical to the original pet.
Following a great demand for cloning pets, ViaGen Pets has increased its rate for cloning cats to $35,000 per animal. The cloning of dogs, on the other hand, costs $50,000.
As Anderson insisted, she didn’t expect her new cat, Bella, to be the same as Chai.
“I never wanted her to be Chai, to me that felt like a replacement. It’s a piece of Chai so that’s what matters the most to me,” she said.
Though she has received a lot of backlash from people since the cloning, the proud cat owner claims that she made the right call because she didn’t get to spend enough time with Chai who died young.
“$25,000 is definitely a lot of money but people spend that on cars everyday or more and no one says anything about that,” Anderson concluded.
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