Garlic Copycat: China’s First Cloned Kitten Has Been Created

Despite the hefty cost not all clients are wealthy according to Sinogene CEO Mi Jidong, who says some are young people recently graduating college. “In fact, a large proportion of customers are young people who have only graduated in the last few years," he said. “Whatever the origin of pets, owners will see them as part of the family. Pet cloning meets the emotional needs of young generations."

Garlic, China’s first cloned cat was born in July, 2019, and the owner hopes the personality of the new kitten is as similar to the old British shorthair cat as the appearance is "similarity between the two cats is more than 90 percent".

Chinese researchers are excited now that a cat has been successfully cloned, they have aspirations for the next challenge of the working theory to now clone pandas building on this success. 

Pet related spending has reached 170.8 bn yuan in 2018 in China, which is roughly $23.7 billion, with this booming continually growing pet market, pet cloning is set to skyrocket among pet owners with a huge spending appetite. 

The first major success in animal cloning was a sheep named Dolly born during 1996 in Britain; Dolly was the first mammal cloned from an adult cell. In 2005 South Korea cloned the first dog, where Sooam Biotech Research Foundation claims to have cloned over 800 pets charging $100,000 a piece.

The claim to being the first cloned kitten goes to CC, which is short for CopyCat/Carbon Copy born December 2001, and is a Domestic shorthair cat cloned by scientists at Texas A&M University.  "CC has always been a perfectly normal cat and her kittens are just that way, too," says Kraemer. "We’ve been monitoring their health and all of them are fine, just like CC has been for the past five years."