Instagram and TikTok’s newest pet influencers are cloned cats and

Grief-stricken pet owners who can’t bear to say goodbye to their four-legged friends are driving the latest crop of influencers on social media: cloned cats and dogs.

Kelly Anderson said she was devastated when her 5-year-old cat, Chai, unexpectedly died in 2017.

“I’ve never really even had a relationship with a human like I did with her,” the 32-year-old Austin-based dog trainer said. “I was very distraught the day she died.” 

The white and tan ragdoll had 85,000 followers on Anderson’s Instagram account @adogandacat when she died from complications following a surgery.

“I lost about 20,000 followers on Instagram after Chai passed,” she explained.

Anderson said she sent a sample of Chai’s DNA to the Texas-based pet cloning company ViaGen Pets shortly after she died. It took four years and $25,000 for Anderson to get a successful clone, and now she’s back in business with Chai’s identical genetic clone named Belle, who was born in 2021. 

Pictures of Belle now fill Chai’s former Instagram feed, along with photos of Anderson’s husky, Ghost. Anderson, who documented the cloned kitty’s journey on Instagram, said it wasn’t sponsored by ViaGen. As of this article’s publishing date the account has nearly 65,000 followers.   

“Some people might buy a car, I bought a clone,” Anderson said. “To me, yeah, it was worth it. I think that she was the most important part of my life.” 

When Anderson said she contacted ViaGen in 2017, the price to clone a cat was $25,000. Today, the company charges $35,000 for cats and $50,000 for a dog. 

“People have problems with how much money it is,” Anderson explained. “But at the end of the day, it’s my money, and no one really should be telling other people how to spend their own money.”

Sammie

The Texas-based ViaGen famously cloned Barbara Streisand’s dog, Sammie, in 2018, which resulted in two exact copies of her cherished pet, Miss Violet and Miss Scarlet.

“So what a cloned animal is, is it’s just essentially an identical twin of the original pet,” explained Melain Rodriguez, ViaGen’s client service manager.  

Rodriguez said the cloning process starts with a small skin sample that can be taken from the animal when it’s alive and then stored to use later or within five days after a pet dies.  

“That tissue sample comes back into our lab that you see here, and we grow millions of cells from that skin sample,” said Rodriguez.

From there, ViaGen takes an egg from a donor animal and fuses it together with the cells it has grown and an embryo starts to grow.