(The New Yorker) – We love our dogs for their individual characters—and yet cloning implies that we also believe their unique, unreproducible selves can, in fact, be reproduced.

In 2016, the original Princess was given a diagnosis of cancer, and Mendola was devastated. He had seen a television program about pet cloning, and, looking online, he found a company in Texas called ViaGen Pets & Equine. ViaGen could cryogenically preserve a pet’s cells indefinitely and generate a new pet from the old cells, for a fee of fifty thousand dollars. Mendola sent off for one of ViaGen’s biopsy kits, and, when Princess had surgery to remove a cancerous mass, he asked the vet to take a tissue sample, which he sent to the company. (Read More)