Editor's Note:

AI, digital life, space travel ... The future is coming at an unimaginable speed.

At this crucial juncture when China has embarked on a new journey to comprehensively build a modern socialist country, such rapid development and transformation not only bring vast opportunities and prospects, but also unpredictable challenges and problems.

These challenges and problems, ranging from the future of human survival, the transformation of local development, to the life and death of a family or a stray animal, could be key topics that trigger social discussion. Each debate surrounding these topics is an inevitable pain point on China's path to pursuing high-quality development.

Against this backdrop, the Global Times has launched the Deep Focus series, focusing on specific issues in current social development. Through detailed investigation and research, we aim to uncover the root causes behind these problems, seek solutions, and engage with relevant parties and sectors to find keys to unlock these complex issues.

A cloned dog is showcased at the Pet Fair Asia at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre on August 18, 2023. Photo: VCG

"It is QQ! It is back! Like we travel across time to when it was still young. I will grow up with it once again!"

"When I see the familiar face, and sense the familiar smell, I know my Bo Bo is back!"

"It is back!" is the most said sentence by the people in the videos a service agent of Sinogenetic Biotechnology Co., Ltd (Sinogene), who is surnamed Liu, sent to the Global Times, which record the touching moments when its customers meet the clones of their deceased pets. Sinogene is one of the first companies to provide pet clone service in China.

In the videos, the owners recall how their pets were there for them through the good and tough times, how sad they were during the period their pets were gone and how moved they were when meeting the pets again.  

Along with the booming number of pets in recent years, Chinese pet owners are becoming increasingly willing to invest significant amounts of money in their pets. 

According to the 2025 Chinese Pet Industry White Paper released by China's leading pet industry data platform Petdata.cn, the pet dog and cat consumption market size in China in 2024 had reached 300.2 billion yuan ($40 billion), showing a year-on-year grow by 7.5 percent. The number of pet dogs and cats in the country exceeded 12,400 in the same year, the white paper said.

To express their deep love, Chinese pet owners are buying high-quality food and fashionable clothing to make sure their pets enjoy a happy and delicate life. When pets inevitably approach the end of their lives, some even begin to seek new ways to bring them back and resume their journey. Pet cloning is one such option. 

In 2024, the scale of China's pet cloning market reached 300 million yuan. At the same time, the global pet cloning market neared 1 billion yuan and is projected to grow to 7.4 billion yuan by 2030, according to forecasts from the Chinese consulting firm Market Monitor.

However, the service is not without controversies. Under the videos Liu posed on WeChat, a few people questioned about the high cost (128,000 yuan is the price Liu offered to the Global Times) of the service and potential abuse of animals during the cloning process. 

Experts and lawyers also pointed out legal gaps, ethical and moral risks and consumption disputes regarding the commercialization of cloned animals. 

To bring you back

According to materials Sinogene sent to the Global Times, pet cloning is a biotechnological process that utilizes the principles of asexual reproduction. It involves transplanting the somatic cell nucleus of a pet into an enucleated egg cell. After a series of complex procedures, a clone that is genetically identical to the original pet is cultivated. 

"Our technicians will come to your house to take cell samples, collecting three small pieces of skin tissue about 2-3 millimeters from the pet's inner thigh. The samples will be very thin and small, and there will be no bleeding," Liu said. 

The sample collecting service costs another 3,500 yuan, according to him. 

Then, the samples will be cultivated in labs for 30-40 days before they can be used to construct embryos in vitro. The embryo, once constructed, will be implanted into the body of a surrogacy animal. After the clones are born, they will undergo a two-month observation, including receiving body check and vaccination, in the company before being officially delivered to the customers, according to Liu. 

The time required for the process varies according to the quality of the cell samples and the difficulty to clone the animal. Taking cloning pet dogs as an example, it usually takes as quickest as six months, according to Sinogene. 

The biggest concern of customers is the similarity between the clones and the original pets, in both terms of appearance and temperament. According to the materials of Sinogene, from a genetic perspective, the relationship between cloned pets and the pets they are cloned from is similar to that of identical twins born at different times. They share the same genetic material, which makes their similarity as high as 99 percent. 

However, the formation and development of temperament are influenced by the environment in which they live, so there may be some certain differences in temperament between cloned pets and the original ones they are cloned from. 

Regarding the health and reproductive capabilities of cloned pets, a relevant representative from Sinogene told the Global Times that based on existing technology, cloned animals can have the same lifespan and reproductive abilities as ordinary animals under normal conditions. 

Scientists have confirmed that cloned animals possess the same vitality as those bred normally, showing no significant differences in lifespan, reproduction, or physiological conditions, the representative noted.

A dog and its clone are showcased at the Pet Fair Asia at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre on August 18, 2023. Photo: VCG

Potential tech

Nearly 30 years have passed since the cloning of the sheep Dolly in 1996. During the period, cloning technology has been successfully applied to various mammals, including mice, cattle, pigs, rabbits, horses, deer, ferrets, and monkeys. The applications of the technology are becoming wider and wider, including breeding selection, the production of transgenic livestock, the propagation of high-quality livestock breeds, accelerating the breeding process, and rescuing endangered and rare protected species.

On Monday, Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based biotech company, announced that, with cloning and gene-editing technologies, they had resurrected dire wolf that died out some 12,500 years ago.  

The animals include two males, Romulus and Remus, born in October, and one female, Khaleesi, whose name is a reference to the TV series Game of Thrones, in which fictional dire wolves play a part, according to MIT Research Review. 

In the future, the company plans to use similar techniques to bring back the Ice Age woolly mammoth in 2028, editing living cell nuclei from Asian elephants - the mammoth's closest living kin - to express mammoth traits preserved in nearly 60 sets of Ice Age remains, according to Time Magazine.

Also on Monday, two Yanbian cattle cloned from somatic cells were born in Bozhou, East China's Anhui Province, a significant breakthrough in yellow cattle conservation and breeding, scientists from Jilin Agricultural University announced that day. 

In the Harbin Polarland in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, the world's first cloned Arctic Wolf Maya has attracted huge popularity, which makes people see a ray of light in the cloning technology to save endangered species. 

In 2006, the park introduced two wild Arctic wolves from Canada, one of which was named Maya. In 2020, as Maya entered her senior years, the park decided to tackle a groundbreaking project - cloning Arctic wolves. After more than two years of effort, the world's first cloned Arctic wolf, also named Maya, was born and made her debut at the park.

Arctic wolf is a species originated 300,000 years ago and has been listed as an endangered species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. According to the IUCN website, among the 169,420 species the union had assessed, 47,187 were defined as threatened species.  

Cloning technology has also been widely used in breeding special working dogs, for example police dogs, in order to effectively preserve genes of some outstanding police dogs, which, to some extent, help to reduce training costs. 

In November 2019, six four-month-old clones of two Belgian Malinois officially entered service in Beijing. A police officer told the Beijing News that, after systematic training, the six clone dogs' capabilities had already reached the ability level of six-month dogs in advance.

Controversial industry

When clone technologies are used on pets, it is more of a method for pet owners to continue their emotional bond with their beloved animals. 

In 2017, Chinese scientists successfully cultivated the first domestically cloned dog, Long Long, using gene editing and cloning technology. Two years later, the first domestically cloned cat, Da Suan, was born in China. Previously, the core technologies for cloning dogs and cats had been in the hands of scientists in South Korea and the US. The world's first cloned dog, Snuppy, was born in 2005 in South Korea.

However, some netizens and experts questioned the necessity of cloning pets. "Clones are just animals looking like the original pets. As a pet owner, what I love is exactly the originally one, not everyone looking alike," one WeChat user commented under a video Liu posed on his WeChat video account. 

Controversies surrounding issues of animal ethics and animal protection also exist regarding commercial pet clones.

"Pet owners should fully understand the technical risks, economic risks, and animal health risks associated with the service before deciding to use it or not," said World Animal Protection scientist Sun Quanhui. 

According to Sun, cloning animals has always been a subject of ethical debate, primarily because the process requires the use of surrogate animals, which can hurt them. 

From an animal protection perspective, allowing healthy animals to endure unnecessary suffering could lead to animal abuse. "The animals used for cloning should not have to face the surgical risks of egg retrieval and embryo implantation, nor should they bear the health risks associated with surrogacy and childbirth," Sun said. 

"Vertebrates such as cats and dogs are sentient beings, and whether in scientific research or commercial projects, we should fully consider the potential harm and adverse effects that the cloning process may cause to animals," Sun told the Global Times.

In response to such concerns, Liu said that, during the cloning service Sinogene provides, each surrogate dog would only be used for surrogacy twice. Regarding the question if there have been failed cloned animals being abandoned, he emphasized that the number of clones is strictly regulated based on customer requirements. 

In China, there are clear regulations regarding the use of animals for scientific research, but these do not extend to the commercial sector. For example, the regulations on the management of experimental animals of China and the guiding opinions on treating experimental animals well both have explicit requirements for the management and use of research animals, with the core emphasis on protecting animal welfare. 

Guo Peng, Director of the Centre for Animal Protection Studies at Shandong University, noted that commercial clone should also complies with these regulations regarding the handling of experimental animals. 

She believed that commercial pet clone is in fact a form of deception built on misleading advertising, which take advantage of consumers' love for their pets. "If what the customers actually suffer is the psychological trauma of losing a pet, then what they need is psychological interventions," she said. 

Guo called for the formulation of industry access standards for pet cloning companies, improvement of animal ethics regulations, and enhanced supervision of related commercial activities to prevent the misuse and abuse of animal cloning technology. It is also essential to implement policies that safeguard consumers by mandating companies to disclose crucial information, including the success rates of cloning procedures, potential health risks, and their responsibilities regarding after-sales support, she noted.

Cloning technology has demonstrated its irreplaceable role in various fields of life sciences, including animal husbandry, biomedicine, and the conservation of endangered species. Regarding the commercialization of the technology, it is essential to fully respect laws and adhere to the principle of "technology for good" to ensure the healthy development of the industry, experts noted.