SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 23: The world's first commercially-cloned pet, a nine-week-old kitten, has been delivered to a US woman who paid 50,000 dollars for a copy of her beloved dead cat, the cloner said on Thursday.

The copy cat, called "Little Nicky", was handed over to a Texas woman known only as Julie on Dec 10, making her the first paying client to receive a genetically-cloned pet, Genetic Savings and Clone said.

Julie had asked the San Francisco-based company to make her a puss just like Nicky, her beloved cat of 17 years, which died in September last year. "Little Nicky is the world's first commercial pet clone," Ben Carlson, a spokesman for the first commercial pet-cloning company, said. -AFP