Copycat: Chinese firm creates the first cloned kitten - BEIJING – Seven months after Huang Yu’s pet cat Garlic died, the British shorthair was given a 10th life. Born on July 21, the new Garlic was created by the Chinese firm Sinogene, becoming the Beijing-based company’s first successfully copied cat. The pet-cloning outfit has made more than 40 pet dogs — a procedure that costs a hefty 380,000 yuan ($53,000), while the price for a cat comes in at 250,000 yuan ($35,000).<br /><br />Mi Jidong, the company’s chief executive officer, told AFP that despite the high price tag, not all clients were high earners.<br /><br />“In fact, a large proportion of customers are young people who have only graduated in the last few years,” he said.<br /><br />“Whatever the origin of pets, owners will see them as part of the family. Pet cloning meets the emotional needs of young generations.”<br /><br />Huang, 23, was overjoyed on first seeing Garlic’s second incarnation, saying the “similarity between the two cats is more than 90 percent.”<br /><br />“When Garlic died, I was very sad,” said Huang. “I couldn’t face the facts because it was a sudden death. I blame myself for not taking him to the hospital in time, which led to his death.”<br /><br />The happy owner says he hopes the personality of the new Garlic is as similar to his old white-and-gray cat as its appearance.<br /><br />With a growing pet market in China, and a huge appetite among their owners for spending, Mi thinks the market for pet cloning is also set to rocket.<br /><br />According to a report by Pet Fair Asia and pet website Goumin.com, pet-related spending in China reached 170.8 billion yuan ($23.7 billion) in 2018.<br /><br />And the country’s scientists have big aspirations for their next cloning challenge, working on the theory that if cats can be cloned, so can pandas.<br /><br />Chen Dayuan — an expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who has been researching giant panda cloning for 20 years — said there could even be scope for cats to give birth to cloned baby pandas, which are smaller than kittens despite their large size when fully grown.<br /><br />Pet cloning is illegal in many countries but approved in countries including South Korea and the U.S., where singer Barbra Streisand announced last year she had cloned her dog.<br /><br />The first major success in animal cloning was Dolly the sheep, born in Britain in 1996 as the first mammal cloned from an adult cell.<br /><br />In 2005, researchers in South Korea cloned the first dog. The Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in Seoul says it has cloned some 800 pets and charges $100,000 each.<br /><br />Music: What Must Be (Deep Mix) by Dhruva Aliman<br />https://dhruvaaliman.bandcamp.com/album/what-must-be<br />http://www.dhruvaaliman.com/<br />Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/artist/5XiFCr9iBKE6Cupltgnlet<br /><br />#Clone #Future #Kitty<br /><br />
