44 The long read

First, take a sliver of ear: inside

the animal-cloning business
The cloning of animals – pets, farm animals, racehorses – is today done routinely on an industrial scale. Bianca Bosker investigates

T wenty-seven
years ago, Ty
Lawrence began to
Increasing numbers
of animals are getting
a similar do-over. In
be haunted by a slab the three decades since
of meat. The carcass, Dolly proved that
which he spotted at a a fully grown mammal
slaughterhouse while could essentially be
doing research as reborn, cloning has
a graduate student, proliferated. By now,
defied the usual nearly 60 different
laws of nature. The species have been
best, highest-quality cloned, including fruit
steaks – picture a rib- flies, fish, frogs, ferrets,
eye festooned with French bulldogs, and
ribbons of white fat monkeys, a feat
– typically come from long thought to be
animals whose bodies nearly impossible,
yield a relatively given the architecture
paltry amount of of primate eggs.
meat, because the
fat that flavours The technology has
their muscles tends become reliable and
to correspond to Norman, Winston, Sven, Fred and George are all clones of a horse named Dynamo lucrative enough
an excess of blubber to be the basis for
everywhere else. This animal, by contrast, had tons of fat, but only companies around the world, which are churning out clones of
where it would be delicious. “In my world,” Lawrence told me, super-sniffing police dogs, prizewinning show camels, pigs for
“people would say, ‘That’s a beautiful carcass.’” As he watched organ transplantation, and “high-genomic-scoring” livestock:
the beef being wheeled towards a meat grader that day, an idea ultra-lactating dairy cows, uncommonly tasty beef cattle. The
hit him: We should clone that. top-ranked polo player, Adolfo Cambiaso, has more than 100
clones of his best horses, and once won a match riding six copies
The technology existed. A couple of years earlier, in 1996, of the same mare at different points throughout the competition.
scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland had cloned Dolly At a 2023 championship game, all four members of his team rode
the sheep. Lawrence lacked the means to make it happen, clones of that mare to face off against their opponents – who were
but he kept thinking about that beautiful carcass. At another mounted on the clones’ offspring. The public hasn’t necessarily
slaughterhouse in 2010, late one evening, he spotted two warmed to this genetic tinkering, which strikes many as creepy.
carcasses resembling the outlier he’d seen years before. But whether or not they realise it, many thousands of clones have
Lawrence – by then a professor already been produced as the
at West Texas A&M University cloning process has become
– immediately called the “Companies around the world are churning more and more routine.
head of his department: he out clones of super-sniffing police dogs, prize-
wanted to reverse engineer
an outstanding steak by
bringing superior cuts of
winning camels, and pigs for organ donation” M any clones start their lives
as a paste of bloody cells
in a storefront that sits between
meat back to life. He would clone the dead animals, and then a quilt shop and Diamond S Rustic Décor in Whitesboro, Texas
mate the clones. “Think of our project as one in which you’re (population 3,852). Whitesboro is the headquarters of ViaGen
crossbreeding carcasses,” he told me. Pets & Equine, the world’s leading producer of cloned cats, dogs
and horses. “That’s what we usually get: it’s like, ‘You do what
A few years later, Lawrence and his team turned two tiny cubes in there?’” a receptionist said when I visited last year. ViaGen’s
of meat, sliced off exceptional beef carcasses at a packing plant, waiting area had the antiseptic comfort of a doctor’s office.
into one cloned bull and three cloned heifers. After breeding the Beyond that was a long corridor flanked by brightly lit rooms
bull with the heifers, Lawrence slaughtered the offspring to assess that held lab equipment, freezers, and several of the embryologists
the quality of the meat, and found it to be just as terrific as the who are among ViaGen’s nearly two dozen full-time employees.
originals’. The next generation’s meat was even better – superior,
even, to that of animals bred from the cattle industry’s top bulls. Technically, a clone is a genetic replica of another living creature
that is “made” – cloners refer to themselves as making animals –
© AMY LYNN POWELL FOR THE ATLANTIC

Ranchers who are keen to mimic Lawrence’s results have since without any of the sexual athletics that traditionally accompany
bought thousands of straws of semen from his bulls. The clones’ reproduction. This level of human control over the biological
offspring and their offspring have, in turn, entered the food order of things has provoked concern that these companies
supply. “The progeny of the clones would’ve been eaten by, are playing God. In an effort to dispel misgivings about the
oh, I don’t know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of technology, cloning firms have almost universally adopted
people.” Of the four original clones, two have died of old age. the tagline that a clone is “an identical twin born at a later
The remaining two are still on the university’s ranch – “grazing, date”. The late billionaire founder of the University of Phoenix
drinking water, living their best second life”, Lawrence told me. established ViaGen in 2002 by licensing patents from the lab

THE WEEK 26 July 2025

 The long read 45
that cloned Dolly. Eventually, his family’s mutt
was cloned four times. Cloning has since been
embraced by wealthy clients accustomed to
N ow you need an animal to impregnate.
For this, ViaGen frequently turns
to a 70-year-old veterinarian named
having their desires catered to exactly. Past Gregg Veneklasen, who, in his 22 years
ViaGen customers include Barbra Streisand, working with the company, has had
who received three clones of her late coton extensive experience dealing with the most
de tulear dog, and the family of Pablo Escobar, contentious and least publicised parts of
which cloned a horse. the cloning process: supplying eggs and
wombs and, when all goes well, delivering
ViaGen’s office is hung with dozens of healthy baby animals.
portraits of saucer-eyed kittens and bow-tie-
wearing puppies – all made in its lab. “Lasting Veneklasen, whose chest-length grey beard
Love” is the company’s slogan, and its website and rotating aloha shirts bring to mind
features nearly 200 endorsements from pet Moses by way of Margaritaville, runs a vet
owners. The lasting love does not come cheap: clinic with a lived-in homeyness that is a far
$50,000 for a cat or dog, or $85,000 for a cry from ViaGen’s buttoned-up operation.
horse, payable online via credit card with all The ViaGen lab in Whitesboro, Texas There, just outside Amarillo, Texas, in
the ease of buying a blender. Once cloning a landscape of unending red flatness,
is complete, the company provides clients with an independent Veneklasen and his colleagues – including a pair of identical
DNA test, confirming that the resulting baby is, in fact, a clone. twins he calls “my human clones”– are busy ultrasounding
foetuses with their arms up mares’ rectums and watching
To copy your animal, you must first send ViaGen a few pieces of newborns take their first wobbly steps. One morning, I arrived
its flesh, which will be used to grow new cells to supply the DNA at Veneklasen’s office to find him sitting at his desk in the dark
for the clone. If the so-called founder animal is still alive, ViaGen with blood on his work boots and crimson smears of placenta in
suggests a sunflower-seed-sized patch of skin from somewhere his beard, wearing the same aloha shirt he’d had on the day
such as the abdomen. If the clonee is dead, the company requires before. He’d been at the clinic since 4:30am helping a mare
a sliver of ear – “For some reason, that grows really, really well,” a deliver a clone, the second version of the same bucking horse
ViaGen technician told me – which should be sliced off within five born in as many days. “It’s pretty cool,” said Veneklasen of the
days of the animal’s death and kept chilled but not frozen to avoid newborn. “That thing was a piece of skin.”
being damaged. Exceptions
can be made. Once, a customer Although Veneklasen specialises
sent in the room-temperature “Even the more pedestrian cloning procedures in horses, including million-
scrotum of a sheep that had often jumble breeds together in a way that dollar rodeo mounts and
been dead for nearly a week. champion polo ponies, his
lends birth a jack-in-the-box quality” fascination with reproduction
Your animal’s tissue will has inspired him to tackle
be minced with a scalpel, bathed in a solution of nutrients more offbeat cloning projects with ViaGen, including big-antlered
and antibiotics, then put into an incubator that mimics the deer for sport hunters, an endangered Przewalski’s horse for
environment of the mammalian body. “Each one of the cells the San Diego Zoo, and genetically modified feral pigs with
in there has the blueprint to make an animal,” Shawn Walker, bright-orange snouts (to tell them apart from regular swine).
ViaGen’s chief science officer, told me as we bent over an Veneklasen guided me into a barn crowded with knee-high metal
incubator to inspect a clear plastic flask where thousands of dog canisters that together contained a small cavalry of frozen clone
skin cells were proliferating in pink goo. The growing cells need to embryos from ViaGen awaiting transfer into mares. He opened
be regularly supplied with the nutrient mixture, and the incubator the top of one container, which spewed clouds of liquid-nitrogen
was fluttering with Post-it reminder notes to “feed Thursday”. vapour as he removed a metal basket of what looked like plastic
coffee stirrers, each with a yellowish-white lump at the bottom:
After about a week in the incubator, ViaGen will harvest a the embryo. Later, a vet threaded a thin stainless-steel syringe
minimum of a million cells from the flask – a sample that, in through a mare’s vagina, then deposited the embryo in her
theory, could be grown and regrown to make an infinite number uterus with a push of a plunger.
of copies of the original animal. ViaGen will then freeze the
cells until the client is ready to clone; the company record for Plenty of people won’t cop to owning clones, or making them.
the most clones for a single customer is 50 horses, the company’s ViaGen works with a variety of contractors, which it calls
CEO, Blake Russell, told me. Although ViaGen has introduced “production partners”, to source oocytes and surrogate females
its own refinements over the years, the cloning process, called for the animals they clone, but aside from Veneklasen, most prefer
somatic cell nuclear transfer, still follows the same basic steps to remain anonymous. “They’re a little nervous about maybe
first developed in 1952 by researchers in Philadelphia to copy a being associated with us,” Russell, the CEO, said. Many scientists
frog embryo. It requires removing an unfertilised egg (an oocyte) who work with clones withhold the location of their facilities out
from a donor animal, then wiping it clean of its own DNA so it of concern that they will be targeted by animal-rights activists.
can carry the clone’s. Working at a microscope beside a photo
of Paris Hilton posing poolside with her cloned chihuahua, A Gallup survey from 2023 found that 61% of Americans
a lab technician uses a glass-tipped pipette to suck out the considered animal cloning “morally wrong”. Enabling a mortal
oocyte’s genetic material and, in its place, insert one of your creature to be born anew, ad infinitum, seems to some like human
animal’s newly grown cells containing its DNA – and thus all overreach, and cloning can involve biological tinkering that
the information, from fur hue to leg length, to grow a twin. feels unsettling. In 2002, researchers tried to clone giant pandas
by injecting their genetic material into rabbit oocytes, which
When animals mate the old-fashioned way, sperm cells have they then implanted into a cat. (It didn’t work.) Even the more
© BRIAN FINKE FOR THE ATLANTIC

to contribute their genetic information to the oocyte; in this pedestrian cloning procedures often jumble breeds together in a
case, they’re irrelevant. The lab technician zaps the egg with way that lends birth a jack-in-the-box quality, as if anything might
a static-electricity-strength electrical pulse that stimulates it come out. To keep up with demand, ViaGen will regularly put
to divide, and after a few days in a body-temperature several dog embryos from multiple clients into a single surrogate
incubator, you have the embryo of a future clone. Dog, cat – meaning that a beagle could theoretically give birth to a litter of
and horse embryos are kept in separate units. “We wouldn’t a cloned chihuahua, a cloned yorkie, a cloned miniature pinscher.
want a mix-up,” Walker said. And that’s when everything goes as hoped. Opponents of cloning

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46 The long read
object that it does not reliably produce
healthy animals. ViaGen doesn’t publish
its data, but Russell did tell me that 60%
W hen a beloved horse dies, Veneklasen
said, he and his twin colleagues
“always tell each other, ‘She’ll be back.’”
to 70% of ViaGen’s cloned horse embryos Our tendency to project a consistency of
will result in pregnancy – a success rate behaviour onto copied creatures reveals
on a par with the industry standard for what people are eager to see in them: that
regular embryo transfers. Yet cloned they are the animal we treasured, back
mammals have been born with enlarged again for another round at life. A clone
tongues, abnormal kidneys, overdeveloped can, in a way, ensure that the original never
muscles, defective hearts and malformed dies. “Really and truly, a horse can be alive
brains, among other ailments. forever. Forever and ever,” Veneklasen told
me. It’s hard not to wonder whether we
Veneklasen told me that in the early days will turn that technology on ourselves.
of cloning, he’d seen problems along these
lines. “Fifteen years ago, it was hell,” he In 2014, a team of researchers in California
said. “They had big umbilical cords. And, removed skin cells from a 75-year-old
some, they were contracted” – meaning man, implanted his DNA into four dozen
the tendons of foals’ legs were unable to oocytes taken from human egg donors, and
fully extend. But in the past decade, he successfully created a cloned human embryo
said, “I haven’t seen any of that”. A 2016 Two of Streisand’s cloned pets (left and right) that developed into stem cells – the precursor
study of 13 cloned sheep, including four to a foetus. Neither that embryo nor several
Dolly clones, found them all ageing normally. The latest evidence others that were made were transferred into a womb; the hope is
suggests that if a clone is born healthy, it will live as long and as that the technology could one day be used to, say, grow you a new
well as any regular peer. These days, cloning works well enough kidney in a lab. But human cloning is no longer a hypothetical.
that companies often wind up with more animals than they Russell told me that ViaGen has been approached by people keen
need. Scientists’ inability to predict exactly how many embryos to explore it. But, he said, “we try to make it very clear our door
will make it, paired with customers’ impatience, can lead to is not even cracked open for that discussion”.
the implantation of extra embryos – say, six to eight to get a
single puppy. At ViaGen, these “overproduction animals” will From the moment Dolly the sheep was unveiled, cloning has
be offered at a discount to the client or adopted by an employee. rattled people’s faith in scientists’ ability to self-regulate. “I’m
(The company does not euthanise extra clones.) Even if a clone is trying to think of any single announcement short of the atomic
born healthy, other animals can suffer along the way. Harvesting bomb that made people as nervous,” a bioethicist told me. The
oocytes and transferring embryos to dogs’ wombs still requires risk of public condemnation hasn’t been enough to prevent some
them to undergo surgery. determined individuals from
experimenting with human
Veneklasen keeps nearly 60 “Human cloning is no longer a hypothetical, cloning. At least four different
“recipient mares” – “recips” and some have already experimented with it” people or groups have, since
for short – which kicked up the early 2000s, claimed to be
dust and nuzzled the dirt while working towards the goal. These
they waited to have eggs removed, embryos implanted, or foals include a cult leader, an Italian physician sentenced to prison for
delivered. I watched one of Veneklasen’s identical twin colleagues, drugging a nurse and harvesting her eggs, and a South Korean
with the efficiency of a line chef, ultrasound several dozen horses scientist who faked data and was convicted of embezzlement
to monitor gestating clones or check mares’ ovulation cycles. and ethics violations in a case that revealed women had been
Veneklasen argues that cloning is “zero inhumane”. Almost paid to donate their eggs for his experiments. None of them,
all of his recips are rescues, he told me – mostly quarter horses as far as we know, has succeeded in copying a person.
(racehorses) that didn’t work out as mounts and, instead of being
slaughtered across the border have been conscripted into a life But what’s actually stopping anybody from trying to clone
of perpetual reproduction. “She’s had 13 babies, and we just put themselves or someone else? In the US, human cloning is legal at
them” – new embryos – “right back in,” he said, pointing to a the federal level. Although some states outlaw the practice, more
22-year-old mare. The surrogates are indisputably seen as more than two dozen others, including Texas, have no prohibitions.
disposable than the clones they carry. But the mares I saw at Given the appetite for immortality among Silicon Valley elites
Veneklasen’s clinic had glossy coats and well-nourished flanks. and others, funding might be easy to come by. “You don’t need
Besides being healthy, a recip’s key qualification is to be “just that much to try human cloning,” says Hank Greely, the director
sweet”, Veneklasen said. ViaGen’s dog and cat surrogates, which of the Centre for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University.
include a range of breeds to accommodate offspring of varying “You need an IVF clinic, basically, and a small lab.” (He added
sizes, are generally not rescues, but are specifically bred to be that it would be “deeply wrong and unethical” to attempt it.)
“docile”, with good maternal instincts, Russell told me.
I spoke with one person who remains eager to give it a go.
As if to settle the question of clones’ well-being, Veneklasen Panayiotis Zavos, a fertility specialist in Kentucky, claimed in
brought me over to see the two recently delivered foals, both less 2009 that a human clone was forthcoming: that he had implanted
than 48 hours old, that had been cloned from a bucking horse 11 cloned human embryos into the wombs of four women.
(a rodeo horse) buried not far away. A clone’s markings can differ Whether he really did this is unclear; no babies were born.
slightly from the original’s because of the way pigmented skin Although he is not pursuing cloning research now, Zavos told me,
cells develop in utero, and the younger colt has a white star on he’s still interested in copying a person. He wouldn’t say what he
its forehead that its predecessor did not. Hannah Looman and her would need to restart his efforts, for fear of being inundated with
identical twin – both with long, dark hair and wearing matching requests. “The activity can be turned on by a switch by tomorrow,
© BARBRA/STREISAND/INSTAGRAM

jeans with zippered vests over long-sleeved shirts – sat cuddling if need be,” he said. Only a few hours before we spoke, he said,
the younger newborn. “People get really freaked out by cloning, he’d received a call from a German woman dying of liver cancer
but you just have to say to them, ‘It’s no different than identical who was curious to explore whether she could twin herself and
twins,’” Looman told me. Veneklasen insists that spending time leave her clone her fortune. That, or harvest its liver.
around clones is enough to convince anyone of cloning’s merits.
“Everybody’s like, ‘Man, this is cooler than heck! That horse has A longer version of this article appeared in The Atlantic
been dead for five years, and yet, there he is.’” © 2025 The Atlantic Monthly Group

THE WEEK 26 July 2025