After losing her cat unexpectedly, she paid $25K to clone her — and the clone’s first reaction brought her to tears
When a social-media manager from Austin named Kelly Anderson lost her ragdoll cat, Chai, the shock pushed her into a decision she never thought she would make. The idea of spending $25,000 to clone Chai made sense to her as she tried to cope with her grief. She hoped cloning would let her keep a small piece of the bond she had lost. When the new kitten finally arrived years later, her very first reaction to Anderson left her emotional in a way she didn’t expect. Only then did Anderson look back on how far she had come since October 2017, when the sudden loss first sent her searching for answers.
As reported by PEOPLE on Wednesday, December 3, 2025, Anderson first bonded with Chai in college during a time marked by stress and depression. “She just immediately synced up with me and understood my emotions in ways that no other animal really ever had,” she told the outlet. Chai was not a cuddly cat, but she showed comfort in quiet ways, especially after spending five months fighting a serious illness as a kitten. Years later, Chai ingested a plastic piece of a food wrapper while under a pet sitter’s care. Though she survived surgery, she reacted poorly to the anesthesia. Anderson walked into the vet clinic expecting to take her home, only to learn the cat had been found unresponsive minutes earlier. The shock sent her searching for anything that might help her hold on to Chai’s memory.
The decision to look into cloning came from a casual conversation Anderson had with her roommate about Viagen, a pet cloning company nearby. After Chai died, the topic resurfaced, and Anderson researched until she felt certain this was what she wanted to do. She knew cloning wouldn’t bring Chai back and accepted Viagen’s reminder that she wouldn’t get an “exact copy of the pet back.” She took out a loan to afford the $25,000 process, expecting the work to take only a few months, but the damaged tissue sample slowed everything down and turned the wait into four years. Then, in October 2021, she finally met Belle, the kitten created from Chai’s DNA. Anderson said the moment felt "surreal," and she focused on Belle as her own cat, not a stand-in. Belle fell asleep on her lap the first time she held her, a small gesture that made Anderson emotional after such a long wait.
Since then, Anderson has watched Belle grow into a confident, outgoing cat with both familiar traits and new quirks. Belle senses her anxiety much like Chai did, but she also enjoys outings that Chai never experienced due to early health issues. Anderson brings Belle to parks, stores, and breweries, sharing their routines with more than 88,000 followers on Instagram. She uses her platform to answer questions about cloning and reminds people, “This is not resurrection, this is not reincarnation.” She suggests that anyone curious think carefully about their reasons and preserve tissue samples while the pets are alive. Anderson has even stored a sample from her dog Ghost, though cloning another pet seems unlikely unless she “wins the lottery.” For now, she is grateful for her bond with Belle and believes cloning can be “the right direction and can really be life-changing.”
For more updates on the cloned cat, you can follow @clonekitty on Instagram.