BEST INBREED

The rise of canine clones.

- ALEXANDRA HOROWITZ

Since 2005, more than two thousand dogs have been cloned.

A few miles off the highway in Hempstead, Long Island, on a gently curving street of tidy two-story homes and raked lawns, there is a sprawling ranch house with a back yard, a pool, and a large, netted enclosure, like an aviary, built to house seventeen cats. But when I drove there, on a bright, chilly fall day, I had not come to see the cats. I pulled in to the driveway, a screen door opened, and two small white dogs emerged, attached by harnesses and long leashes to John Mendola, a retired police officer in his fifties with a mild manner and a broad, kind face. (The house is his mother’s; he lives in a smaller place nearby.) He introduced me to the dogs, Princess Ariel and Princess Jasmine. They were named for a deceased, much mourned dog named Princess—part Shih Tzu, part Lhasa Apso—whom they strongly resemble. As they should: they are Princess’s clones.

Mendola took me inside and sat on a sofa, a new Princess on each side, while he told me about their forebear, a stray who was brought into the police precinct when he was on duty one day in 2006. “We had animals my whole life,” he said. “I never had one that was so affectionate. She’d look at me and give me that soulful eye.” He gave a sigh of satisfaction. “It was a special bond.” As he spoke, he reached out and stroked Princess Jasmine reflexively.

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.