Arthur Murray loves, and needs, his dog Stella. The owner of a vineyard in Healdsburg, California, Murray was looking for a dog who could help protect the family and their land.
When he discovered the Maremma Sheepdog, a rare dog breed originally from Italy, he knew he had found the perfect “wine dog.”
“Maremmas chase off birds, turkeys in particular, which will pick you clean when your grapes get really sweet,” Murray tells TODAY.com.
His dog, Stella, fits the breed’s description. “She is always on guard and always helping us keep things the way they should be,” he says.
When she reached 10 years old, Murray began worrying about how many years she had left — her breed’s life span is about 10 to 12 years. That’s when a friend made a joke about dog cloning and he started to research the idea in earnest.
While Murray had heard of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal successfully cloned from a living adult animal in 1996, he didn’t know the technology was commercially available.
Founded in 2002, ViaGen Pets and Equine is an Austin-based company that set out to commercialize reproductive technologies for livestock and horses. As the technology developed, they were able to preserve the genetics required to clone pets like dogs and cats as well.
The company now uses the same technology that allowed for the creation of Dolly, a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). This process allows scientists to derive live cells from an animal and then create an egg that can be implanted into a surrogate animal.
“We focus primarily on dogs, cats, and horses but our technology can be applied to almost any mammal,” a ViaGen spokesperson wrote in a statement to TODAY.com. “No one species is necessarily more or less difficult than others, they just each require their own unique approaches and resources to successfully clone that species.”
Murray decided to try it. “It’s all science fiction to me, I have no idea how it’s all done, but I don’t think I knew what to expect, and I was nervous,” Murray tells TODAY.com. “But the actual cloning process was very easy.”
From start to finish, the typical process takes around a year, including the average eight month-long waitlist. There comes a two month gestation period after the embryo transfer, and then the newborn puppy will stay with the surrogate mother and vets for at least eight weeks before meeting its owners.
Mella, short for the Italian word Gemella, meaning twin, was born at the beginning of this year, a genetic clone of Stella. Today, Mella and Stella spend time together running around Murray’s vineyard, Flambeaux Wine, located in the Sonoma valley.
“They’re 100% physically identical. But I was never in a delusion that they would be the same dog,” Murray says. “Their personalities are very different, but I thought at a minimum having Mella observe Stella while she’s still alive would maybe help pass on some of that personality and some of those traits.”
Heather Huson, an associate professor and associate chair of Cornell University’s Department of Animal Science whose research focuses on animal genetics, says cloned animals are never going to be the same animal.
“You could have two dogs that have the same genetic sequence, but if you put them in two different environmental scenarios of how they’re trained, how they’re socialized, they can be very different dogs behaviorally down the road,” Huson tells TODAY.com.
Recently, celebrities like Tom Brady and Barbra Streisand have made headlines for cloning their animals. The service is available to anyone willing to pay ViaGen’s steep price tag: It costs $50,000 to clone a dog or cat and $85,000 to clone a horse.
Despite its high price tag, the cloning process is growing in popularity, with people sharing life with their cloned pets publicly.
However, people are raising concerns about the biomedical ethics of the cloning process.
Critics of the cloning process argue that cloned animals are more prone to disease. Studies show that the process has a high failure rate. Animal rights groups like PETA argue the process could be painful for the original animal.
“For cloning and a lot of genetic science, oftentimes the science is there,” Huson says. “There’s really that other side of, what are the ethics? What are the applications? How do we apply that science? And that’s a very different part of the story.”
Murray hears the criticism, but emphasizes that cloning was the right choice for his situation. “I understand why people feel the way they do, but I also want them to understand why it made sense for our family,” Murray says.
