Big Cat Rescue will pivot to conservation efforts across the world. Meanwhile, TikTok “influencer” Hasbulla says people are attacking him for “nothing” over a video showing him abusing his cat.
We start with some great news: Big Cat Rescue is shutting down because its services will no longer be needed.
Of course there are still plenty of tigers, lions, jaguars, leopards, pumas, lynx and cheetahs in the non-profit sanctuary’s care, but the passing of the Big Cat Public Safety Act has finally put an end to the cruel, abusive and absurd practice of keeping big cats as pets.
The animals will be moved to Turpentine Creek, an accredited animal sanctuary in Arkansas. Big Cat Rescue will continue to fund their care and will sell its existing land in Florida as it transitions to programs to prevent the extinction of big cat species, almost all of whom are critically endangered.
“We have always said that our goal was to ‘put ourselves out of business,’ meaning that there would be no big cats in need of rescue and no need for the sanctuary to exist,” Big Cat Rescue wrote in a memo released this week. “Supporting our cats in larger enclosures at Turpentine Creek, at much lower cost per cat than we incur by continuing to operate Big Cat Rescue, will free up resources to let us do much more to save big cats in the wild.”
Credit: Waldemar/Pexels
The Big Cat Public Safety Act has not only made it illegal to own tigers and other wild cats as pets, it also puts an end to the cub-petting business used by roadside zoos, in which cubs are taken from their mothers as infants so the roadside zoos can charge customers to pet the cubs and pose for photographs with them. While big cat “pet owners” are grandfathered in, many have been rescued and there will be no more pets after the current group dies out.
Influencer Hasbulla says people “are attacking me for nothing” over video in which he abuses cat
Hasbulla, the Russian influencer whose videos have been viewed more than 10 billion times on TikTok, says people are making a big deal over “nothing” in response to a video showing him abusing his cat.
Hasbulla is 20 years old but has a child-like appearance due to a genetic condition.
The 3’4″ social media “star” is known for frequently talking about “acting like a man” and in addition to being an enthusiastic supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his war in Ukraine (he’s called Putin “a lion” on several occasions), he holds typical Russian views on the way men are “supposed” to act.
Hasbulla said he was merely disciplining his cat for “misbehaving.”
“Those brothers who think that I was beating the cat, pulled the ear, this and that. I pulled the ear gently,” Hasbulla said in a video accompanying a Twitter post. “I know that people are waiting for the moment, if I write something wrong, to just attack me like this. Like, ‘you do this, you do that’. She was misbehaving and I just pulled the ear and that’s it. I love my cat more than you. If I didn’t love the cat, I wouldn’t have it at home. My most lovely animal is a cat. And when she disobeyed, I scolded her a little. And you are attacking me for nothing.”
Of course anyone with common sense knows cats are not capable of “misbehaving” because they have no concept of what behaving means by human standards, and Hasbulla is being dishonest when he claims he was “gently” disciplining the cat.
In the video, which the Russian voluntarily uploaded, he’s seen grabbing the terrified cat by her ear and yanking violently. The cat runs from him and retreats to a cardboard box where she tries to soothe herself, but Hasbulla follows, scolding her in his native language and hitting her several times on her head and body.
Unfortunately there is little concern for animal rights in Hasbulla’s country, so it’s very unlikely he’ll run afoul of any Russian laws, and even less likely that an animal welfare organization will confiscate the abused feline.
Hasbulla filmed himself pulling his cat by its ear and repeatedly smacking it.
Even if you haven’t heard the name Hasbulla Magomedov, chances are you’ve seen images of the Russian’s cherubic face, which exists in the pantheon of internet memes with the likes of Cash Me Outside Girl, Kermit and Condescending Wonka.
Magomedov is not a child, despite his 3’4″ stature and toddler-like appearance. He’s an adult man who suffers from a form of dwarfism, although he’s never publicly spoken about his condition in detail.
Normally known simply by the mononym Hasbulla, beyond his status as a meme the diminutive Russian is mostly known for hawking garbage (cryptocurrency, self-branded merchandise, supplements) and for his nebulous association with mixed martial arts, existing as a sort of barnacle on the UFC where he appears at weigh-ins, uploads video of himself providing commentary and is carried around as a kind of good luck totem by Russian fighters.
Now Hasbulla is famous for something else — horrifically abusing his cat.
In a new video — which Habsulla was apparently proud of and voluntarily shared publicly — the 20-year-old speaks in his native Russian while pulling violently on his cat’s ear. The feline — which is terrified of Hasbulla and flinches when he approaches — escapes to the safety of a shoe box, but his tiny tormentor follows, smacking the poor cat on its body and head while barking in the gutteral nonsense that passes for a language in his gas station of a country:
Hasbulla boasts six million followers on Instagram, 1.5 million on Twitter, and his videos on TikTok have amassed an astounding 10.3 billion views.
The video is disturbing enough on its own, though I can’t help but wonder if Hasbulla is willing to share this kind of behavior, what’s going on when the cameras are off?
And if people are willing to physically abuse their cats to feed the content beast and keep their viewers “entertained,” how will they lower the bar in the future when their clicks slow down and they feel they need to do something even more shocking to reignite interest?
An older photo of the same cat in kittenhood, when Hasbulla introduced the kitty to his followers. The sweet cat
Staff are demoralized, volunteers are spooked and the shelter has been buried in negative reviews after a TikToker picked a fight over an adoption fee and her army of followers went vigilante.
The voicemail is chilling not only for the explicit threat the person on the other end makes, but for her chipper tone as she casually threatens the lives of the people working at a west Michigan animal shelter.
“So anyway,” the caller says at the end of the unhinged message, “I’ll blow this number up and I’ll blow your location up as well. Hope you have a wonderful day!”
It’s one of three bomb threats the shelter has received since TikTok influencer Chloe Mitchell began the saga of what she calls “the $900 cat.”
Mitchell adopted a kitten from Michigan’s Noah Project, a small no-kill shelter, in early March. Staff say she didn’t balk at the adoption fee and they thought she was happy with the sweet kitty she took home, but the next day Noah Project’s phones began ringing incessantly with callers heaping abuse on the shelter’s volunteers and staff.
Apparently in the throes of adopter’s remorse, Mitchell uploaded a video to TikTok, the popular Chinese social media app, and raged about the adoption to her three million followers, screaming into the camera as she accused the shelter of identifying her as an easy mark and making a tidy profit off the kitten’s adoption fee.
Sickly kittens and sizable veterinary bills
Mitchell originally came to the shelter, camera in tow, asking specifically for a cat named Heart. The influencer filmed her visit and gushed to her viewers that she’d fallen in love with Heart, a mixed-breed kitten with Savannah heritage.
Heart, or as Mitchell calls her, “the $900 cat.” Credit: Noah Project
Shelter staff explained the kitten was from one of two litters that were brought in with serious ailments after a woman purchased a pair of queens from a breeder.
The former breeder cats went into heat and had babies, predictably, and the situation quickly grew out of control. When the woman realized she couldn’t care for the cats and their many ailing babies, she brought them to the Noah Project, which took on the Herculean task of caring for kittens that had problems ranging from anemia to developmental deformities like swimmer’s leg, also known as deformed leg syndrome.
Noah Project staff had to rush three of the kittens to an emergency veterinary hospital. Another required a leg amputation. Two kittens died, and the remaining babies had to be nursed back to health over three months, with special diets, medication and care on top of the normal costs associated with spaying/neutering, micro-chipping and vaccines.
Taking on that many sick kittens would stretch the resources of any animal shelter, let alone a small rescue, and the Noah Project set the adoption fees at $900 per kitten to help recoup the considerable costs.
Whipping an army of followers into a frenzy
Mitchell wasn’t phased by the fee, shelter staff said, but things quickly turned sour when she went home and posted the dramatic video, sparking the ire of her followers.
After that first video racked up almost six million views and almost 28,000 comments, Mitchell turned the experience into her own miniature “season” of online television, making half a dozen monetized videos in which she accuses the non-profit of lying to her about Heart’s breed and scamming her with the adoption fee.
Collectively, the videos have more than 30 million views, and Mitchell’s increasingly pitched rhetoric has whipped her three million followers into a frenzy.
In the video above, Mitchell acts out an alleged conversation with the shelter and confuses coat pattern for breed, saying “Feline experts have approached me online to say that she is in fact not an African Savannah and is more of a tabby-looking animal.”
“And they’ve stayed that I did get wrongfully charged that $900 in your shelter, which isn’t looking to re-home animals [but] make a profit off of them, and that’s not okay… I was taken advantage of, and that really sucks, I gave you my money for a reason that you were being truthful about her breed.”
Prompted by Mitchell’s insistence that the shelter was “scamming” adopters, her followers turned vigilante, review-bombing the Noah Project on Google and harassing its staff by phone. The shelter, which has been named the best rescue in west Michigan by its local newspaper several years in a row among other plaudits, saw its five-star Google review rating evaporate as negative reviews piled up, and the angry calls keep coming in. (“Unethical scammer! …shady, greedy business!” one of Mitchell’s followers wrote, while others dubbed Noah Project a “retail rescue” that “prioritizes profits over placing animals in a loving home.”)
The experience has been bewildering for shelter volunteers who aren’t accustomed to being the target of international ire.
“One woman [who answers phones at the shelter] doesn’t want to come back this week because it was so bad for her,” said Mashele Garrett-Arndt, Noah Project’s director. “It’s hard to explain to someone in their 60s or 70s. They don’t understand how [followers] can be so loyal to a person in a video. They don’t understand how people can be so cruel.”
Volunteers and staffers have taken the brunt of the abuse from Mitchell’s followers. Several don’t feel comfortable returning to the shelter because of the threats, Garrett-Arndt said.
The callers have said “they hope we die. They hope that we suffer and lose our jobs, they hope our families suffer. Horrible, horrible things,” she said.
As a result of the abuse and the threats, the Noah Project went to the local police, who are now keeping watch over the shelter. They’ve also hired private security, installed cameras covering the property, and have taken to scheduling staff to man the building overnight to watch the premises.
In an effort to end the squabble, Garrett-Arndt reached out and offered to refund Mitchell’s adoption fee, but said the influencer will no longer return the shelter’s calls.
Despite that offer, there’s no end in sight to the drama: Mitchell repeated her accusations that the shelter was trying to “profit” from her in an interview last week with MLive, a website that serves readers of a dozen newspapers across the state, and did an interview with the local Fox affiliate, WXMI, for a news segment that aired Monday.
Mitchell claims the shelter never mentioned the medical issues as the reason why the adoption fee was higher than usual, and says shelter staff told her Heart was “a super rare African Savannah” as rationale for the fee. She suggested she’ll continue her campaign to shame Noah Project until the shelter “proves” Heart is a Savannah, a mix of a wild serval and domestic cat.
“All of this will go away if they send me the certified paperwork ensuring she [is] in fact an African Savannah and I was rightfully charged $900,” the TikToker told WXMI.
But in her initial video Mitchell admitted she didn’t know what a Savannah cat was, and in another video she says she doesn’t care if Heart is a particular breed.
“I trusted you and I gave you my money for a reason, believing that you were being truthful with me about her breed, which didn’t matter to me at all, because I just love this animal,” she says in the video.
The constant stream of new videos about the situation and the behavior of Mitchell’s enraged followers has had a dramatic impact on the rescue.
“It has just been consuming our lives for the past four weeks,” one staffer told WXMI.
No one gets into animal rescue to make money, despite Mitchell’s claims that Project Noah’s staff are using animals in some sort of get rich quick scheme, and Garrett-Arndt told MLive she’d gladly open the shelter’s books to Mitchell or anyone else with concerns to show exactly how much was spent on vet bills and the other expenses involved in saving the sickly kittens and their mothers.
Pleading poverty and punching down
In her first video taking issue with Heart’s adoption fee, Mitchell pleads poverty and suggests the shelter saw her as an easy mark.
“I could just not eat,” she says with a theatrical expression, complaining that the fee is “two thirds of a Yorkie” and a quarter the price of a Louis Vuitton bag.
“I spent $900 on a fuzzy scratch ball that’s going to puke all over my furniture,” she says.
But Mitchell is not the typical college student working a part-time job and eating Ramen noodles to stretch her budget. As a volleyball player at Michigan’s Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, she’s well known as the first collegiate athlete to profit from the NCAA’s new NIL (name and image likeness) deal, which pays college athletes when their names and likenesses are used in broadcasts, promotional materials, video games and other revenue-generating activities tied to their sports.
Mitchell went on to found a company that guides other athletes on NIL deals, and she makes a considerable amount of money on TikTok. Creators on the platform who have three million followers can expect to earn about $15,000 a month from viewership alone, and articles going back to 2021 state Mitchell receives lucrative sponsorships on her videos.
“Five-figure deals are her baseline” for sponsored posts, a story on MLive notes, saying Mitchell was earning up to $20,000 per sponsored post at the time, when she had fewer followers than she does now.
If Mitchell scores a conservative two sponsored posts per month, that could put her earnings at $55,000 a month from TikTok alone, not including money earned from her NIL deal. Very few college students earn that kind of cash, yet Mitchell claimed the $900 adoption fee was “life-changing money.” In addition, she refers to her new pet almost exclusively as “the $900 cat.”
She dismissed the idea that she was creating problems for the Noah Project, telling WXMI that she doesn’t think she’s responsible for what her followers do.
“I never asked for the internet to go call them or to leave Google reviews in my defense whatsoever,” she said. “I’m not asking to be defended, I’m just asking to be heard.”
With 30 million views on her videos about “the $900 cat” saga, she’s been heard. The shelter? Not so much.
“To call people scammers, that’s a huge thing,” Garrett-Arndt told PITB. “You don’t just say someone scammed you. For her to say that about Noah Project, that hit hard for everyone.”
Garrett-Arndt said Noah Project’s social media staffer is hard at work trying to rectify the one-star reviews Mitchell’s followers left on the shelter’s Google listing, and said it’s taken considerable time to combat the damage to the shelter’s reputation.
Time spent dealing with negative reviews, filing police reports and reassuring spooked volunteers means less time dealing with the rescue’s primary mission — saving animals.
Garrett-Arndt said she consulted an attorney about taking to TikTok to tell the shelter’s story, and the attorney warned her that doing so could provoke an even stronger reaction from Mitchell, who has an enormous megaphone.
She said she doesn’t want to anger Mitchell for fear of what the influencer could do in the future, but believes the whole saga was manufactured for the benefit of the influencer’s TikTok account and followers. When the story blew up, she ran with it and wouldn’t return calls from the shelter in an attempt to fix the situation.
“She needed content, so it’s like ‘Let’s go get a cat,’ and then it got out of hand,” Garrett-Arndt said. “She has three million followers, but we have to stand our ground. The truth will come out.”
In the meantime, Mitchell — perhaps with an eye toward creating more viral content — says she’s getting a DNA test for Heart and has threatened to contact the other adopters who took home cats from the same two litters.
“Five other people paid the $900 adoption fee and not one of those people had an issue with it,” Garrett-Arndt said of adopters who took home the other kittens from the sickly litters.
The offer of a refund still stands, and staff at the Noah Project hope there’s an end to the madness.
“Why wouldn’t she come back to us? We’ll refund her,” Garrett-Arndt told PITB. “If you’re that unhappy about the $900, bring the cat back. Adopt another cat so we don’t have to [deal with] this and we don’t get dragged through the mud.”
After a TikToker raged about an adoption fee for a cat who had medical issues, her army of followers began harassing the shelter and its staff.
I don’t advocate criminality, but if some enterprising, preternaturally skilled hacker were to go Tyler Durden on TikTok and not just disable it for a few hours with a DDoS attack, but nuke it to oblivion by taking down its servers, backups and back-end code, that hacker would be a hero.
Songs would be written for this legend of a human being, performed to raucous applause by bards in taverns. A reincarnated Abraham Lincoln would lead a parade of patriots to the White House to wrap the benevolent hacker in the American flag and present the presidential Medal of Freedom. A bald eagle would alight on a Rose Garden cherry tree, raising a wing in salute to our hero, and fireworks would inaugurate a new federal holiday in honor of the glorious deed and its magnificent author.
But that’s not going to happen, so I have to type the words “TikTok influencer” and try not to gag as I relate the story of one Chloe Mitchell, a Michigan college student who sicced her army of three million followers on a non-profit, no-kill animal shelter.
Mitchell is one of those people who makes you wish life had mute buttons. She tells her side of the story with theatric facial expressions, frequently screaming — literally screaming — into the camera as she claims she fell in love with a cat at Michigan’s Noah Project and didn’t balk at the $900 adoption fee.
She says she’s happy with her cat, Puka, and loves her. But she still has adopter’s remorse.
“I spent $900 on a fuzzy scratch ball that’s going to puke all over my furniture,” she says at one point in a video she made after the adoption.
She bemoans the adoption fee, saying the cat costs “two thirds of a Yorkie” and a quarter the price of a new Louis Vuitton bag.
“Why isn’t there a price tag on her cage?” Mitchell screams. “Why can’t she be a $25 cat? … That’s life changing money, $900. I could just not eat.”
Mitchell’s followers, who called the shelter operators “scammers” and said they “played” Mitchell, among less charitable comments, have been targeting the shelter online and by phone, making “profanity-laced calls,” according to MLive.
Mitchell says the shelter told her the adoption fee was so high because Puka is an F5 Savannah, a fifth-generation hybrid of a domestic cat and an African serval. In her video she admits she doesn’t know what a Savannah is and confuses a tabby coat pattern for a breed.
But Mashele Garrett-Arndt, Noah Project’s director, told MLive the adoption fee reflected the substantial costs the shelter incurred by rescuing Puka, her litter mates and kittens from the other litters she came with, who had multiple medical issues. The shelter paid for veterinary surgery, including procedures for one cat who had two legs amputated, as well as shots, microchips, spaying/neutering, and special diets for the ailing kitties.
Puka, originally named Heart by the shelter. Credit: Noah Project
The Noah Project took in the young cats and their mothers from a woman who purchased the momma cats from a breeder. The mother cats went into heat again, predictably, and the problem multiplied litter by litter until the woman realized it was out of her ability to control and passed the problem along to the shelter.
The Noah Project took the mother cats and kittens, like any good rescue would, but an intake like that would stretch the resources of most shelters, let alone a small local operation. (See the appeals for assistance when larger organizations like the SPCA take in cats from hoarding situations, for example.) That this happened on the cusp of kitten season makes it even more difficult.
Since adopting Puka — and making a video in which she goes back and forth between saying she already adopted her and claiming she was thinking of adopting her — Mitchell has made at least half a dozen additional monetized videos about “the $900 cat,” including one in which she introduced her parents to their “$900 grandfurchild” and another in which she seemingly pretends to be on the phone with someone from the shelter, lecturing them about “taking advantage” of people and “profiting” off them. In the video, she does not pause long enough for the alleged person on the other end to speak.
“I’m so mad about this because she’s not only lying about this story but she’s making a profit off this,” Garret-Arndt said. “These cats came from an older woman in her 80s who bought these cats and overbred and couldn’t handle the situation. They all had medical issues and that’s the reason they were $900.”
Garret-Arndt told MLive her books are open for Mitchell and anyone else to inspect. In addition, the IRS 990 forms of non-profits are available via sites like Guidestar, allowing donors to check information like percentage of revenue spent on programs, meaning the amount that goes to the charitable cause after overhead.
Mitchell’s series of videos on her “$900 cat” saga had amassed almost 30 million combined views as of March 24
Mitchell isn’t hurting for cash despite her claim that she might have to go without eating after adopting her “$900 cat.” As a college volleyball player, she’s known as the first NCAA athlete to profit financially from NIL (name and image likeness), co-founded a company for other athletes looking to capitalize on NIL, and says she paid for Puka with money she made from the TikTok Creator’s Fund. In addition, she’s bragged about her many sponsorships.
An earlier story about Mitchell’s earnings said that in addition to the money she earns directly from the NCAA NIL deal, “five-figure deals are her baseline” for sponsorships.
Mitchell earns up to $20,000 per sponsored post, the story notes — and that was in 2021, when her follower count wasn’t as high. That’s an extraordinary amount of money for anyone, let alone a college kid, and doesn’t match up with her video pleading poverty over an adoption fee.
With 3 million followers, Mitchell could earn as much as $15,000 a month directly from TikTok alone, not including the lucrative sponsorships. Her initial post about the saga of her “$900 cat” registered almost six million views, some 28,000 comments and more than 660,000 likes. In all, her series of videos on the cat saga have amassed almost 30 million views. Most creators can only dream of those engagement numbers and the revenue associated with them.
In other words, Mitchell is not the typical college student working a part-time job in between classes and eating Ramen noodles to stretch her budget, and it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say she’s punching down by picking a fight with a small local rescue.
“I feel like she (Mitchell) got that cat as a stunt for her followers,” Garret-Arndt said. “She specifically asked for that cat. We were told she was an African Savannah cat but we don’t know.”
To her credit, Mitchell does seem taken with Puka, and we hope she cherishes the beautiful kitten regardless of whether she’s got serval lineage or is just a “basic” cat. Every cat is worthy of love and deserves a good home, and it appears Mitchell is doting on Puka, buying her lots of toys and cat furniture and cuddling with her.
Take it from me, loyal servant to a “basic” no-breed kitty: what’s important is the bond you form and the memories you make together, not the rarity of the breed. I wouldn’t part with Bud for $900,000, let alone $900.
In the meantime, the Noah Project continues to take abuse from the “influencer’s” followers, “swearing at us and calling us a horrible organization,” Garret-Arndt said.
“We don’t scam people,” she told MLive. “If they want to see my books and what I paid for medical, they can.”
She said the Noah Project is a small organization that focuses on making sure cats go to good homes instead of ending up in kill shelters where they’re likely to be euthanized.
“All of our animals leave here fixed and with all of their shots and preventatives, as well as being microchipped,” she wrote in a Facebook post in response to the manufactured controversy. “This all-costs money. No one is making a profit here, everything goes back into the shelter for medical supplies, food, etc.”
Mitchell says she’s ordered a DNA test for Puka and plans to do a reveal on TikTok, providing more material for more monetized videos in her ongoing saga of “the $900 cat.” She says she’ll “defend” the shelter to her followers if the DNA test does reveal serval lineage, but the damage has already been done, and we can’t help but wonder if she’ll be willing to offer a meal culpa after quadrupling down on claims that the shelter ripped her off.
Genetics, gene-editing and cloning have rapidly matured since the days of Dolly the Sheep, which means we have less time than we think to grapple with some heady moral questions.
Should scientists resurrect long-extinct species? Is it ethical to clone thousands of animals who will not live, but have their organs harvested for human patients?
Those are some of the questions people are asking as the cloning industry — once relegated to producing one-off copies and genetically identical versions of deceased pets for wealthy clients — is expanding with new capabilities.
This story by the BBC’s David Cox provides an informative, brief history of cloning before pivoting to the current state of the industry and how it could continue to evolve.
Two of the most fascinating prospects have to do with conservation. One company, Colossal, is working on bringing back the extinct woolly mammoth, while other scientists are turning to cloning as a way to prevent the extinctions of species like the white rhino, which is functionally extinct without any breeding pairs left living.
Scottish scientists shocked the world when they cloned Dolly the Sheep in 1996.
As with anything in science, innovations in cloning unlock new applicative branches, and scientists have partnered with the medical field to address human health concerns. Some, like the practice of editing genes to prevent diseases in newborns, tend to fly under the radar. But others, like the push to adapt organs from animals like pigs so they can be replacements for human organs, are much more controversial and have met opposition from animal welfare groups.
Then there’s the elephant in the room, no pun intended. What about cloning humans?
Right now no one’s gone down that route, at least not publicly, because of the inevitable backlash. What’s happening deep in the bowels of clandestine medical facilities in nations with murky ethics laws is another question entirely.
I am opposed to human cloning, but I don’t believe it will remain the immutable taboo some people think it is. Someone will break the dam, and while that pioneer will likely get raked over the coals, the bell cannot be unrung. Things change so fast these days that what’s shocking one day merits a shrug the next, and it’s possible the world will be introduced to a man or woman one day before it’s revealed the person is, in fact, a clone. (Not unlike the way the world was introduced to Imma, a Japanese influencer and model who exists only digitally.)
Imma has more than 400,000 Instagram followers, she models the latest fashions and she appears in adverts for products like beverages and watches, but she doesn’t exist. She’s a digital creation.
They’ll be the Dolly the Sheep of the human race, and ethicists won’t get a say in whether they should exist because it’s already been done.
“See how normal they are?” people keen on cloning will say. “They’re just regular people. Are you going to tell them they shouldn’t live?”
But before that, it looks like the movie Gattaca will become reality, and people will order up a great baseball player or a child with intuitive musical genius just like they might commission a piece of art or a custom car job. Gene editing with CRISPR is surprisingly trivial.
Of course, it won’t be lost on people that we’re cloning humans when there are millions of unwanted, uncared-for street kids in the third world, not to mention people who live without the consideration of their fellow human beings in every nation. Just like it hasn’t escaped the notice of activists that South Korea and China are leaders in cloning pets, yet dogs and cats are also food in those countries.
What separates the dogs and cats bound for restaurant kitchens from the dogs and cats having their cells preserved for cloning?
Nothing except for their individual value to humans, just like pure luck separates a cat who finds a loving home from a cat who ends up euthanized with a needle. We are a fickle species.
Yet both the beloved pet and the unwanted shelter cat are sentient, experience intense emotions and have their own thoughts. That’s not conjecture, it’s fact as confirmed many times over experimentally, but it shocks a lot of people. Our education system has not done right by the billions of non-human minds we share our planet with.
These rhesus macaque infants were cloned in a lab in China. The remaining barriers to human cloning are ethical, not technological.
I’ve thought about what might have happened if Buddy had been adopted by someone else, and what his fate may have been. I love the little guy, but it’s possible that someone else may have viewed him as an annoyance, a loud and incessantly chatty cat who needs an inordinate amount of attention and affection, sometimes lashes out, and needs to be surrendered.
Likewise, unwanted cats have languished in shelters for months before viral posts spark interest in them, and suddenly offers to adopt come in by the hundreds from across the globe. Nothing about those cats changed, but humans formed an emotional attachment to them after learning their stories.
Of course, the ethics of how we treat and consider animals can change depending on where you’re sitting. If you’re young, healthy and energetic, your view may be radically different than the person sitting on an organ donation waiting list, knowing their time may be up before a new liver or kidney becomes available. Suddenly a seemingly simple moral calculus becomes murky and complex.
There’s strong evidence that people who take the first steps toward cloning their beloved cats and dogs spend time wrestling with the ethics of the decision as well. Texas-based ViaGen, the western leader in commercial cloning, told the BBC that 90 percent of its clients are not people who have gone through with cloning, but have only taken the initial step of preserving their pets’ cells for $1,600.
And what of the mammoths? Bringing them back from extinction isn’t as simple as filling in the gaps in their genome, implanting gene-edited eggs in female elephants and hoping gestation takes care of the rest. Mammoths are social animals. Will an elephant mother raise a mammoth baby? Where does that mammoth baby belong? Without a herd of its own kind, can it be happy?
We can’t ask the mammoths, and even if we could, it might not be up to them anyway. As one paleogeneticist put it to NPR last year: What if the technology isn’t used to resurrect the mammoth, but to save the elephant? Does the end justify the means in the latter situation, but not the former?
Mammoth, Dolly the Sheep and rhesus macaque images credit Wikimedia Commons
Pain In The Bud 