He also questions the decision to expose pets to an experimental procedure like cloning.

GSC says that while it hopes to eventually bring prices down, cat clones would only be for relatively few pet owners and shouldn't affect the number of adoptions.

The firm also financed the first cloning of a cat - CC, a calico born in 2001 whose stripes differed from its genetic original.

The fact that Little Nicky and three other such kittens produced by the firm this year more closely resemble the animals being cloned is the result of a process called chromatin transfer, Carlson says.

Reproductive cloning works by fusing a hollowed-out egg cell with a cell - usually a skin cell - from the animal being cloned.

The resulting fused egg begins dividing, creating a clone embryo that is implanted into a surrogate mother.

Fewer than 5% of attempts typically result in a successful birth.

Chromatin transfer, a process that GSC licenses from a cattle-cloning firm, adds an additional step to cloning by exposing the donor cell genes more cleanly, in theory, to the egg cell.

However, the firm has not published statistics on its findings in a scientific journal, leaving outside researchers uncertain about the claim.

How it works: Before cloning, technicians chemically remove extraneous genetic material from the donor skin cell.

To do this, they make holes in the nuclear membrane of the skin cell, soaking it in a substance that dissolves the membrane.

This facilitates the removal of specific cell regulatory proteins associated with the skin itself, leaving behind the basic genetic material, or chromatin, inside the cell.

The chromatin, rather than the entire donor skin cell, is then placed inside the egg cell.

GSC was originally co-founded by billionaire John Sperling in an effort to clone his dog Missy.

The company hopes to start selling canine clones next year, Carlson says.

Dog clones have proven harder to produce than cats because dogs ovulate eggs too immature for cloning until they are aged in the lab, a dicey process.

"We think we're pretty close. It could be as soon as a few months," Carlson says.