I met Princess Ariel and Princess Jasmine on a sunny afternoon at a park in Garden City, New York. The two dogs—both creamy-colored Shih tzu mutts with spots on their backs—were lying next to each other on the grass, front legs extended, tongues hanging out. Every so often, they’d both look off to the side at the same moment—then turn their heads back again simultaneously. When two excited little girls came over to pet them, the dogs’ owner—John Mendola, a retired police officer—made pleasant small talk with the girls’ parents. Eventually, though, he shared something that made them raise their eyebrows in surprise: The dogs were not only twins but twin clones, spawned from the DNA of his late dog, Princess.

…I talked with several pet-clone owners to find out what they’d wanted—and whether they’d gotten it.

…Surrogates are leased from a breeder; Melain Rodriguez, ViaGen’s client-service manager, told me that all of the company’s customers used to have the option of adopting their clone’s surrogate, but after too many clients complained that their cloned dogs were bonded more tightly with their surrogate than with them, ViaGen stopped offering canine clients the option.

…Unsurprisingly for some owners, the attachment they’d had to their initial pet is impossible to re-create. Kelly Anderson, a dog trainer in Austin, Texas, told me that her late ragdoll cat, Chai, first came home with a lot of diseases, so Anderson spent months nursing her back to health, which she felt strengthened their tie. Chai was not a particularly affectionate cat, but in moments when Anderson was depressed, she said Chai would snuggle up to her, somehow seeming to sense her turmoil. She believes that Chai saved her life on numerous occasions. When Chai died unexpectedly at 5 years old, Anderson decided to clone her and named the new kitten Belle.

Belle looks just like Chai—long-haired white fur and bright-blue eyes—but her demeanor is entirely different. Though Chai was always reserved, Belle is outgoing; whereas Anderson nurtured Chai through near-fatal illness, Belle has always been perfectly healthy. Anderson loves Belle enormously and doesn’t regret her choice to clone. But she’d forged a bond with Chai based on very specific experiences: coaxing her out from under the bed when she was scared, gently getting her to swallow her medicine, gaining her trust. With Belle, Anderson told me, she doesn’t feel the same connection. She doesn’t just miss the combination of DNA that was Chai; she misses their relationship, which was built on unreplicable memories and experiences.

Other owners feel like their clone is so similar to their original pet that they hardly need to start over at all. West Westmoreland, who owns a construction company in Jacksonville, Florida, told me that Peanut II, his cloned miniature dachshund, is essentially a perfect continuation of his predecessor, Peanut. Peanut I had been deeply attached to Westmoreland, who’s quadriplegic and uses a wheelchair, and had quickly become his service dog—spending most of her time in his lap and accompanying him to his doctor appointments. When she died after 13 years, Westmoreland was devastated. Several months later, when he brought Peanut II home, the clone took on the same care-giving role as her predecessor. As soon as she could reach his foot pedals and clamber up his legs, she started spending most of her time in his wheelchair, not wanting to let him out of her sight. “It’s like having the same dog”, he told me. “It’s unreal.”

… it’s also likely that genetically identical animals who are raised by the same owner, in the same environment, could end up displaying familiar behaviors—or at least that owners would interpret their behaviors as similar. Pets are, after all, the perfect object for this kind of projection: They can’t challenge their owners’ assumptions about who they are, what they remember, or how connected they feel to their two-legged family.

However familiar a clone might seem, though, a pet owner’s initial loss isn’t so neatly resolved. Mendola told me he feels that Princess Ariel and Princess Jasmine are like the original Princess “in a new shell.” But still, he misses Princess terribly. Since she died, he hasn’t been able to sleep in the bed he shared with her; he, Ariel, and Jasmine use a different room.

Westmoreland does feel like he has his treasured Peanut—or “P1” as he now refers to her—back in the form of Peanut II. But he also has two new dachshunds, Cleo and Zoe; he adopted them right after Peanut died, but they were nothing like her and, he felt, didn’t fill the void she’d left.

I asked Westmoreland if it was possible that he might have bonded with Cleo and Zoe more had he not been so focused on re-creating a specific relationship with Peanut II. Perhaps, he told me, he would have connected especially with Cleo, hoping she could eventually turn into a good service dog—but now he’ll never know, because he decided Peanut II was right for the position. In fact, Westmoreland is so pleased that he’d consider getting a Peanut III. But if he keeps replacing Peanut with clones, I wonder whether he might be postponing his grief, rather than coping with it.

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