"Consumers are likely under the impression that a clone is a carbon copy. We believe they are being misled," AAVS policy analyst Crystal Miller-Spiegel said.

David Magnus, director of Stanford University's Center for Biomedical Ethics, spoke more bluntly.

"People are not getting what they think they're getting," Magnus said. "This is a $50,000 rip-off."

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In fact, Genetic Savings and Clone announced this week that it is reducing the price of its clones to $32,000 per kitten, part of a business plan that Hawthorne said aims to make the company profitable in the next few years.

"I think it's going to be a multibillion-dollar market," he said. "There will be thousands of dogs and cats [cloned] every year."

Not if the AAVS has anything to say about it. At a minimum, the group's petition to the USDA says, pet-cloning companies should have to register as a "research facility" subject to the same degree of federal oversight that university and other research labs withstand. Currently they are effectively unregulated because they are not classified as animal research labs, breeders or kennels.

The California legislation, under development by assembly member Lloyd E. Levine, a Democrat from Van Nuys, would outlaw the sale or transport of cloned or engineered pets, which could include larger mammals such as horses and calves meant as "companion animals."

Levine's bill, like the AAVS report, reflects perhaps the most glaring concern of pet-cloning opponents: the enormous glut of homeless pets already. Last year, about 1.5 million dogs and cats passed through California's shelters, and two-thirds of them were euthanized, the bill's preamble notes.

"Pet cloning serves no good purpose, does harm to animals and should be banned," said Richard Hayes, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a public affairs organization based in Oakland. "Assembly member Levine's proposal is long overdue, and other states should follow his lead."

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