Ask HN: Have you ever cloned a cat? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have you ever cloned a cat?

35 pointsarthurcolle43 comments

I see it'll cost about 60K

Getting the genetic material seems trivial.

Can anyone recommend a service?

Maybe get a new cat and donate $60k to an animal shelter?

I guess the fact of such services existing and competing drives forward and funds genetics research, so from that point of view I'm glad they exist, but it seems like a strange way to spend so much money.

It is not strange if you ever had a pet that meant a lot to you.

I know people who have grieved for months after losing their cat and their dog. Their connection was much more than "just a pet", it became family and as important as a child, sibling or parent.

Cloning is of course not guarantee the pet will be exactly as the original, but if there's a chance it will have similar personality I can very much understand the willingness to pay for it.

I get missing a pet dearly. I don't get how the clone fixes anything. Replacing them with a clone that has no memories seems like declaring the memories and history mean nothing, and that to me is a strange betrayal of the lost relationship.

Grief is hard, but going back is impossible.

The cloned cat may still have the opportunity to interact with the original, so it could just be taken in as a "child" kitten of the cloned cat.

The project is mostly to prove viability as I've seen focus on dogs and horses.

There is a great documentary on a scientist who is cloning Saudi Arabian horses.

Ah, I see. Well it's viable as people are doing it, but as well as being expensive it leads to multiple other cats needing homes: https://www.catster.com/weekly-mews/the-dark-side-of-cat-clo...

Seems best avoided.

That's fair. I'm not an evil cloner.

I was just curious, one could say, more or less.

Day, Dusk & Dawn cats. The idea seems something out of Issac Asimov's foundation.

Grieving for a pet is totally a thing. Comparing its importance to that of a child might be taking it a little far. Nothing would compare to losing a child.

I agree with you. I can imagine that people without children that have pets might feel like it's similar, but there's definitely quite a few several hundreds of thousand of years of evolution driving very distinct reactions.

Losing a child must, by force of nature, be much more difficult to handle than even a 20+ year relationship with one's dearest horse or Galapagos turtle or tiger cub or something.

It is interesting to think about, in any case.

We also don't allow cloning children, no matter how much you miss them. It's an ethical quagmire, and doesn't really address the problem (dealing with grief is hard, transplanting that grief onto a surrogate creates more problems)

If anyone in the Boston area is interested in adopting a cat, I can heartily recommend:

https://www.straypetsinneed.org/

and

https://guardianangelscatrescue.org/

from which we recently adopted Grace Hopper and Enrico Fermi, now beloved family members.

Thank you for the links, I appreciate this. :)

I could maybe see the worth of this if it was a $60k medical bill to save a dying cat. But even a successful clone will only be physically identical, not behaviorally. And it feels like the resemblance would just magnify all the differences.

I love cats and dogs dearly, so I don't say this lightly, but please just get a new cat (even the same breed!) and save the money for a worthier cause.

Would it actually be physically identical? Don't certain characteristics like spots/stripes/etc have some amount of variance due to embryo development?

Exactly. Identical twins don't have the same fingerprints.

Anyone with a spare 60K who would use it to clone a cat rather than to improve the lifes of existing cats (donating to local shelters, TNR programs, etc) hardly deserves to have a cat.

I’ve been cloning and battling cats for the past week, it’s highly addictive: https://store.steampowered.com/app/686060/Mewgenics/

I know everyone on this site is a Netflix SRE making $450k a year but are people really spending their money on cloning their pets??

There are people leaving millions of $ as inheritance to their pets, I am not surprised that someone tries to clone someone they love/loved...

I would love to be the person burdened with hosting such a pet heir. Call me!

There’s also something psychologically risky about cloning:

If the new cat behaves differently (which it will), you’re forced into one of two painful positions:

“This isn’t really them.” “Why aren’t you like you used to be?”

That comparison can prevent the new animal from being accepted as its own being.

you wouldn't download a cat

[00s heavy electric music intensifies]

Interestingly, the most cloned animal in the world are horses [1].

Given how popular (and expensive) it is for horses, it likely delivers on the results people are looking for. Note that current cloning techniques don't clone the mitochondria, which represents 1%-2% of the genome.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_cloning

Horses are also orders of magnitude more valuable (financially) than cats. Nobody is paying $70 million for a cat for their breeding program...

> I see it'll cost about 60K

It also only has a ~30% success rate, so it might be in the ballpark of $200K to get a living clone

I once made a clone of cat(1), making sure not to include the -v option because it's considered harmful.

Seriously, though, why are you asking? Was there some breakthrough in biology recently that made it feasible and available?

Or are we actually talking about cat(1)?

Commercial off the shelf animal cloning for pets and animal husbandry has been around for well over a decade at this point.

My clone of cat(1) is called redpanda(no manual) that includes kitty terminal graphics protocol support so I can do `cat nyan.png` and the png rendered to the terminal I'm using (ghostty) instead of cat spewing a bunch of garbage.

https://github.com/fragmede/redpanda

I just realized that you can run sudo apt install nyancat on Ubuntu. It even includes a man page.

Just to note, that's output using standard ANSI escapes and not kitty or sixel terminal graphics support.

cat &

A UNIX fork is actually a clone of the process, in the first place.

(SCNR)

Yes, they looked the same, but behaved completely differently…

Wasted money.

You paid money to get to the Sematary? I think you may have been scammed by the locals.

If you do, would be interesting to see how much of the same behaviour is shown by the new cat so do share

I have no idea what genetic material is, but cloning a `cat` is very easy, the instructions in German are very clear: "Nie Kaffee verwenden, sondern immer `tee`!" :) I'm also not sure why it costs `60K` for you? Only `14,320` here.

Give this a shot https://github.com/sharkdp/bat

But in all seriousness I’m interested in knowing the answer to this too, just out of sheer curiosity.

Cloning vegetables is way simpler, I use to clone my potatoes every year.

I understand why this post would get flagged but I love the question, it never came to my mind how logical it would be for someone to clone their beloved pet.

If you do, would be interesting to see how much of the same behaviour is displayed by the new cat so do share

Yes, I have and no there aren't any services, because it's illegal almost everywhere. But if you give me the 60k, I'll write a wikihow for it.

Schrodinger’s cat?

Famously impossible due to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem

but we won’t know until we look, and possibly destroy the cat in the process!

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