Little Nicky

Little Nicky holds a strange and pioneering place in history as the world's first commercially cloned pet. In 2004 a woman in Texas, grieving the death of her seventeen-year-old Maine Coon named Nicky, paid the company Genetic Savings & Clone a reported 50,000 US dollars to produce a genetic copy from tissue that had been banked before the original cat died. The resulting kitten, Little Nicky, was born to a surrogate mother and delivered to his owner as the first cat ever cloned as a paid commercial service rather than as a research project.

His arrival ignited a fierce ethical debate. Animal-welfare organisations argued that with millions of cats in shelters awaiting homes, spending a fortune to duplicate one animal was indefensible, and pointed out that a clone shares only its predecessor's genes, not its memories or personality. The owner countered that Little Nicky looked and behaved remarkably like the cat she had lost. Cloning also proved commercially unviable at that price, and the company that made him closed a couple of years later.

Little Nicky's real significance is as a marker of a threshold crossed: the moment pet cloning moved from laboratory curiosity to a product on sale. Every debate since about cloning companion animals traces back, in part, to one grieving owner and one very expensive kitten.