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A Chinese company has announced it is planning a mass sale of cloned cats to the general public.

Sinogene, China's first biotech company to create cloned pets, is planning to sell the cats for around £29,000.

It is planning to target bereaved pet owners who have lost their feline.

The announcement comes after a scientist from the company cloned their first kitten named Garlic, born a month ago at the company's laboratory in Beijing.

Sinogene only revealed its existence this week after the animal got stronger.

The original cat, which supplied the cells for cloning, and Garlic are identical in appearance but have different temperaments, memories and personalities.

To enable the cloned cats to share the same memories with the original, the company is considering the use of artificial intelligence.

The company currently says it is targeting 100 to 200 orders this year but hopes to receive 300 to 500 annually.

A cloned cat's life expectancy is the same as any other cat, Lai Liangxue, Sinogene's chief scientist and a research fellow revealed.

Sinogene made headlines by cloning a gene-edited beagle in May 2017.

Then a month later it launched commercial cloning services.

It is currently cloning dogs by using a lab to remove the cells from a dog’s egg and then transplant cells from another dog.

The company's deputy general manager Zhao Jianping told Crime Russia there also plan to clone horses and carrier pigeons in the future.

Sinogene is also planning to expand services to eventually include gene editing.

Sinogene’s CEO Mi Jidong said: “We’ve discovered more and more pet owners want their pets to accompany them for an even longer period of time."

In 2014 a woman in Texas, US, became the world's first owner of a cloned-to-order feline, after paying biotech firm Genetic Savings & Clone Inc, $50,000 for a genetic duplicate of her dead pet.