The Times Magazine 39delivers the baby just as she might in any other
pregnancy. (The surrogates don’t treat the
clones any differently than they would their
own brood, Russell tells me: “It’s their baby.
They look after it like it’s their baby.”)
ViaGen also enlists a third-party lab to
perform DNA tests on every cloned animal so
that owners can rest assured that the pet they
receive is indeed a clone of their cherished
pet, and not some random puppy. Because
when clients drop significant sums of money
on Fido II, they typically have one big question:
just how similar are clones to their originals?
“If you think about identical twins in
humans, if you look for the similarities, you see
them; if you look for the differences, you see
them,” Russell says as he sits in his sunroom,
underneath a large photo of six wolf hybrid
puppies he cloned for a client. Still, he says, the
similarities are uncanny. He describes cloned
horses who will stand in the same spots in
a field as their original, who enjoy being
scratched in the same places, and who
seem to like and dislike the same people.
“You think about the guys that debated
nature versus nurture. Before cloning, there
was really no way to dispute one or the
other. But now, with cloning, you can actually
physically see it,” says Russell. “Genetics
are more powerful than we ever dreamt.”
Stubborn misconceptions about cloning
are serious marketing hurdles for ViaGen.
The biggest one is that cloned animals have
more health problems than other animals
and/or age prematurely. That rumour started
circulating after Dolly developed osteoarthritis
in her knee and died, at the age of six, after
contracting a virus that causes lung tumours.
Scientists later determined that her having
been cloned had nothing to do with the
osteoarthritis, at least; since then, other Dolly
clones have gone on to lead long, rich lives
full of delicious roughage (and occasional
biomedical experimentation). But this belief
is so pervasive, Russell says, that even when
he shows visitors his own healthy clones, such
as Fit, they express concern about the horses’
life expectancy.
Some clients forget that the clone of their
adult pet will not emerge from the womb as
an adult. “People will clone their dog and then
they realise, ‘Oh gosh, I wasn’t ready for a
puppy,’ ” Russell says.
The newly initiated may also have difficulty
accepting that clones are just regular animals.
I find myself scanning ViaGen’s downy-tailed
foals for signs of their sci-fi origins – a light
neon glow around them, perhaps, or the faint
whirring sound of a motor deep in their guts.
But all I see are normal, spindle-legged babies
who sniff my hand curiously before wobbling
nervously on tiny, teacup-size hooves back
to the safety of their surrogate mother’s side.
When a cloned animal is before you, the factthat it is the physical embodiment of some of
the most advanced biomedical technology of
our time seems almost incidental.
It’s easy to see why clones are still so
misunderstood. They’re not talked about often,
even among those who own them, much to
the dismay of Russell and ViaGen’s marketing
team. The company has had many celebrity
clients, he says, but almost all of them choose
to remain anonymous. And with good reason.
After Barbra Streisand, a ViaGen client, told
Variety in 2018 that she had purchased two
clones of her 14-year-old coton de Tuléar dog,
Samantha, online critics deemed the decision
“shameful”, “insane” and “evil”. People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) issued
a statement in response to the news, calling
Streisand’s decision a “folly” and saying that
cloning is a “horror show”.
So Russell understands clients’ reluctance
to go public, but he looks wistful as he talks
about how great it would be for business if
customers were more open. And as for the
“adopt, don’t shop” crowd, Russell says, he
is “not touching” that issue, though he notes
that cloned animals aren’t the ones filling
shelters. “Every animal that we produce has
a home before we produce it, right?”
Rodeo is big in Russell’s family, which
is just as well, because it’s one of the sports
in which clones are allowed to compete.
Physically, cloned horses can do anything
a regular horse can do, but bureaucratically,
things aren’t so simple. Much like the complex
constellation of cloning laws that exist in the
human world, in the horse world, the rules
regarding cloned animals differ wildly between
sports and breed associations. In some sports,
like polo, cloned horses are increasingly well
represented. Over the course of a polo match,
riders will swap out horses several times.
With clones, instead of hopping on a different
animal and having to adjust to a different size
and stride, a player can jump onto the original
horse’s genetic twin.
Polo players are big money for ViaGen
because instead of ordering one or two clones
of a horse, they may order five or ten that
they can ride during games. Russell attributes
clones’ popularity in the sport to the fact that
Adolfo Cambiaso, one of the top players in the
world, frequently rides clones of his deceased
stallion Aiken Cura. (ViaGen helped produce
several of Cambiaso’s clones early on.)
After polo, Russell says, showjumping is thesport for which ViaGen gets the most clone
requests. There weren’t any clones at the
Olympics last year, but Russell thinks that
has more to do with timing than anything
else. It can take ten years for a jumper to be
Olympics-ready and, he says, most clones in
the sport simply aren’t old enough yet. He’s
hopeful some clones will appear in the Paris
Olympic Games, in 2024, but given the high
levels of secrecy many of his clients choose to
maintain, it’s quite possible no one would ever
know if they did. “They may not even tell us,”
he says. Some clients decline to give ViaGen
any details about the original animal besides
its species and size.
For the time being, Russell seems to
have found a happy balance between farm
life and his work reshaping the world of
genetics, partly by centring his business on the
more ethically palatable area of pet cloning.
That’s why right now, for instance, ViaGen
will clone only nonprimate mammals.
“The human cloning questions, the primate
cloning questions – we’re out of that. We
don’t entertain it,” he said. Nor does ViaGen
offer gene-editing services for the animals it
produces – another slippery ethical slope it
hopes to avoid. If the horse you want to clone
had a genetic heart condition, the clone will
likely have the same condition.
While ViaGen’s business has grown in
recent years, theirs is still a niche, luxury
product. (The company does not release
exact numbers, but it has produced more
than 1,000 cloned horses and about the same
number of cloned dogs and cats combined,
Russell says.) Even if cloning technology
advances to the point where the company
could start cranking out clones at a rapid
rate, Russell says, that’s not something he’s
particularly interested in. “People don’t want
us to look like a factory.”
In cloning, as with other areas of animal
production and preservation, the lines
consumers and producers draw are at once
firm and somewhat arbitrary: we eat pigs, one
of the most intelligent animals, but we would
never eat dogs; we clone, but not too much,
and not primates. Although the intellectual
and moral inconsistencies of these beliefs
become apparent under even the lightest
questioning, we cling to them. These lines
seem to exist less for the animals’ wellbeing
and more for our own comfort, as a way to
reassure ourselves that although humanity
continues to press its thumb heavily on the
scales of nature, it’s doing so in a thoughtful,
responsible way. Right?
Animal cloning doesn’t seem likely to
reshape the face of the planet any time soon.
As Russell tells me, “You’re not going to wake
up in ten years and all your neighbours are
going to have cloned pets.”
Although, I suppose, how could you tell? n‘People will have their
dog cloned and then
realise, “Oh gosh, I wasn’t
ready for a puppy” ’
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN TEXAS MONTHLY