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Comment by TheChaplain | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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)

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