A DALLAS woman, heart-broken at her cat’s death, has taken delivery of the world’s first cloned pet.

Julie, an airline worker who has withheld her last name because she fears anti-cloning activists, paid $50,000 (£26,000) to a California company to clone her beloved Nicky who died last year aged 17. Little Nicky was born in October and presented to Julie at a party at a San Francisco restaurant.

“I see absolutely no differences,” she said. “When Little Nicky yawned I even saw two spots inside his mouth, just like Nicky had. Little Nicky loves water, like Nicky did, and he’s already jumped into the bathtub like Nicky used to do.”

The first commercial cloning of a pet was denounced by ethics experts and animal rights groups.

Harry Griffin, the assistant director at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh which cloned Dolly the sheep, said that pet cloning was an “illusion”.

“Cloning will not recreate a loved pet,” he said. “A clone might be 99.95 per cent genetically identical to the original but it will grow up with a personality and behaviour all of its own.”

Wayne Pacelle, the president of the Humane Society, America’s largest animal protection group, said: “There’s no doubt that cloning causes animals to suffer. For every successful clone, there are dozens of animals who die prematurely, who face shortened life spans, who have physical abnormalities and who face chronic pain and suffering.”

Little Nicky was produced by Genetic Savings and Clone Inc, a California company co-founded by John Sperling, the Arizona billionaire, who wanted to clone his dog Missy.

Three years ago, the company produced the world’s first cloned cat, named CC, an abbreviation of carbon copy. Before Little Nicky, the company had produced Peaches, a clone of a cat called Mango, and Tabouli and Baba Ganoush, clones of a Bengal cat named Tahini.

The company is promising to produce a cloned dog next year. Missy’s DNA remains in the company’s gene bank and it plans to make the spayed canine the first cloned dog.

British pet-lovers are already expressing strong interest in cloning. “We have received more interest from UK clients than from any place outside of the US, with the possible exception of Japan,” Ben Carlson, a spokesman, said.

But Britain’s stringent anti- rabies rules, requiring that pets entering the country be not only vaccinated but have a follow-up test six months later, mean that kittens would be eight months old by the time they were delivered.

When Nicky died, Julie sent tissue samples to Genetic Savings and Clone, which cultured them and preserved them in liquid nitrogen. The company buys ovaries from spay clinics across the United States, which would otherwise discard them.

Then, using a chromatin transfer process that it licenses from a cattle-cloning firm, it extracts the eggs and combines them with genetic material from the cats to be cloned. The embryo is then implanted into a surrogate mother cat.

LEGAL TEST

ANY attempt to clone a pet in Britain would fall foul of animal experiment legislation.

While many animals have been cloned legally, most notably Dolly the sheep, cloning is among the procedures that cannot be performed on animals without a Home Office licence. Applications to clone animals are approved only if scientists can show that the work has a valid research purpose, that suffering will be kept to a minimum, and that there is no alternative to the use of animals.

Commercial cloning of a pet cat would fail these tests, as it has the potential to cause suffering to animals for a trivial purpose. Cloning requires the use of eggs that must be removed from an adult cat in an invasive operation, which usually requires a general anaesthetic. The majority of cloned animals are also born with abnormalities, and many die soon after birth. Dolly developed arthritis at a young age.

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