Dolly was the first cloned animal – and that was 30 years ago now. So where are all the clones? Here’s a good article that covers the quick state of things.

Firstly, there is huge failure rates. Dolly took 277 attempts for a single birth. The epigenetic reprogramming required for the clone cells is hard and fails often, but has led to new techniques such as using ethical sourced adult induced pluripotent stem cells for drugs and regenerative medicine research.

Breeders have cloned a horse and even had them compete in equestrian sports; but livestock industries are uninterested and still rely on traditional breeding due to costs and failure rates.

China and the United States offer commercial pet cloning for cats and dogs. Barbra Streisand cloned her dog Samantha into two new puppies. But, the personalities of the new clones were different than the original dog. Just because you share DNA doesn’t mean you’ll share personalities – which any parent of identical twins can tell you. Epigenetic, environmental, and socialization differences are still powerful elements.

Researchers in China cloned a rhesus monkey in 2024 due to its physiological similarity to humans. The supposed goal was to speed up drug testing; but raised serious ethical questions due to the low success rate and lack of real-life applications.

Finally, there is bringing back extinct animals. This requires a fully intact genome, a suitable egg cell, and surrogate species. No ancient animals have yet been discovered with fully intact DNA. Even recently extinct animal DNA is usually unavailable. Though there are methods like CRISPR that might combine ancient DNA with gene-editing technologies; or create mammoth-like animals by editing existing elephants.

So, that’s why we don’t have massive cloning going on even though the technology has been around for 30 years.