Remix.run Logo
Ask HN: Have you ever cloned a cat?
30 points by arthurcolle 3 hours ago | 33 comments

I see it'll cost about 60K

Getting the genetic material seems trivial.

Can anyone recommend a service?

mkl 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe get a new cat and donate $60k to an animal shelter?

I guess the fact of such services existing and competing drives forward and funds genetics research, so from that point of view I'm glad they exist, but it seems like a strange way to spend so much money.

TheChaplain 24 minutes ago | parent [-]

It is not strange if you ever had a pet that meant a lot to you.

I know people who have grieved for months after losing their cat and their dog. Their connection was much more than "just a pet", it became family and as important as a child, sibling or parent.

Cloning is of course not guarantee the pet will be exactly as the original, but if there's a chance it will have similar personality I can very much understand the willingness to pay for it.

Jordan-117 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I could maybe see the worth of this if it was a $60k medical bill to save a dying cat. But even a successful clone will only be physically identical, not behaviorally. And it feels like the resemblance would just magnify all the differences.

I love cats and dogs dearly, so I don't say this lightly, but please just get a new cat (even the same breed!) and save the money for a worthier cause.

gyomu an hour ago | parent [-]

Would it actually be physically identical? Don't certain characteristics like spots/stripes/etc have some amount of variance due to embryo development?

ksaj an hour ago | parent [-]

Exactly. Identical twins don't have the same fingerprints.

Sharlin 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anyone with a spare 60K who would use it to clone a cat rather than to improve the lifes of existing cats (donating to local shelters, TNR programs, etc) hardly deserves to have a cat.

wetpaws an hour ago | parent [-]

[dead]

btheunissen 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’ve been cloning and battling cats for the past week, it’s highly addictive: https://store.steampowered.com/app/686060/Mewgenics/

an hour ago | parent [-]
[deleted]
gpt5 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Interestingly, the most cloned animal in the world are horses [1].

Given how popular (and expensive) it is for horses, it likely delivers on the results people are looking for. Note that current cloning techniques don't clone the mitochondria, which represents 1%-2% of the genome.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_cloning

xyzsparetimexyz 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I know everyone on this site is a Netflix SRE making $450k a year but are people really spending their money on cloning their pets??

an hour ago | parent | next [-]
[deleted]
mk89 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

There are people leaving millions of $ as inheritance to their pets, I am not surprised that someone tries to clone someone they love/loved...

ksaj an hour ago | parent [-]

I would love to be the person burdened with hosting such a pet heir. Call me!

KaiserPro 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

you wouldn't download a cat

[00s heavy electric music intensifies]

klez 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I once made a clone of cat(1), making sure not to include the -v option because it's considered harmful.

Seriously, though, why are you asking? Was there some breakthrough in biology recently that made it feasible and available?

Or are we actually talking about cat(1)?

derektank an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Commercial off the shelf animal cloning for pets and animal husbandry has been around for well over a decade at this point.

fragmede an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

My clone of cat(1) is called redpanda(no manual) that includes kitty terminal graphics protocol support so I can do `cat nyan.png` and the png rendered to the terminal I'm using (ghostty) instead of cat spewing a bunch of garbage.

https://github.com/fragmede/redpanda

user142 an hour ago | parent [-]

I just realized that you can run sudo apt install nyancat on Ubuntu. It even includes a man page.

fragmede 19 minutes ago | parent [-]

Just to note, that's output using standard ANSI escapes and not kitty or sixel terminal graphics support.

swiftcoder 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I see it'll cost about 60K

It also only has a ~30% success rate, so it might be in the ballpark of $200K to get a living clone

ktpsns an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

cat &

A UNIX fork is actually a clone of the process, in the first place.

(SCNR)

binaryturtle 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have no idea what genetic material is, but cloning a `cat` is very easy, the instructions in German are very clear: "Nie Kaffee verwenden, sondern immer `tee`!" :) I'm also not sure why it costs `60K` for you? Only `14,320` here.

eimrine 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Cloning vegetables is way simpler, I use to clone my potatoes every year.

linesofcode 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Give this a shot https://github.com/sharkdp/bat

But in all seriousness I’m interested in knowing the answer to this too, just out of sheer curiosity.

potatie 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you do, would be interesting to see how much of the same behaviour is shown by the new cat so do share

bertylicious 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, I have and no there aren't any services, because it's illegal almost everywhere. But if you give me the 60k, I'll write a wikihow for it.

Traubenfuchs 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, they looked the same, but behaved completely differently…

Wasted money.

tetha 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You paid money to get to the Sematary? I think you may have been scammed by the locals.

potatie 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you do, would be interesting to see how much of the same behaviour is displayed by the new cat so do share

2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
[deleted]
deafpolygon 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Schrodinger’s cat?

nvader 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Famously impossible due to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem