A cat lover in Texas has become the world's first owner of a cloned-to-order feline, paying $50,000 for a genetic duplicate of her dead pet.

Now eight weeks old, Little Nicky was produced by a California company, Genetic Savings & Clone Inc.

The creature's owner, a woman in her 40s who works in the airline industry, said she was delighted with the result.

"He is identical. His personality is the same," the woman, identified only as Julie, told the Associated Press.

"When Little Nicky yawned, I even saw two spots inside his mouth - just like Nicky had," she said. "Little Nicky loves water, like Nicky did, and he's already jumped into the bathtub like Nicky used to do."

The company said it is now hoping to tap into the much more lucrative cloned pet dog market.

But reaction from within the scientific community and from animal protection advocates was almost universally negative, with experts saying that, eight years after the creation of Dolly the Sheep, animal cloning remains a highly experimental science.

"This is total nonsense. To resurrect a dead pet is simply ridiculous," Rudolf Jaenisch, a cloning expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Guardian.

"The very likelihood is that these cats may look the same, but these animals will not be normal. They will have a very short lifespan like Dolly and other cloned animals did, and they will have serious health problems."

Julie is also lucky that Little Nicky is an exact match of the original, which died last year at the ripe old age of 17.

The world's first cloned cat, born in December 2001 as a joint production between Savings and Clone Inc and Texas A&M University, had a different coat from that of the original. Coat colour is not entirely genetically predetermined.

But the potential problems did not faze Julie. When her original cat died she sent a DNA sample to Savings & Clone. Researchers used a technology known as chromatin transfer, in which Nicky's DNA was transplanted into an egg cell whose nucleus had been removed. The embryo was then placed in the womb of a surrogate mother to produce Julie's pet.

However, the process was highly risky.

Lou Hawthorne, Genetic Savings and Clone's chief executive, said that roughly a third of the clones in their experiments did not survive beyond 60 days. Between 15% and 45% of cloned cats born alive die within 30 days, he said

The high death rate has attracted the anger of animal protection advocates, who say there is no useful application for pet cloning. The Humane Society of the United States estimates between three and four million unwanted pets are put down every year in the US; the $50,000 (￡26,000) cloning fee for Little Nicky would have paid to neuter more than 1,400 cats.

"With millions of healthy cats and dogs in the United States, the last thing we need is a new production strategy," Wayne Pacelle, the society's president, told the Guardian.

At $50,000 a pet, there are unlikely to be huge numbers of cloned cats in the near future.

In Britain, the idea is far from the minds of most scientists. "It's a rather fatuous use of the technology," said Dr Harry Griffin, director of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, which produced Dolly.

It also goes against the spirit of the Animals in Scientific Procedures Act, which says that the benefit of the research must be in proportion to any potential harm done to the animals.

Dr Griffin said that cloning pets would not satisfy this requirement for most scientists. "I suspect animal rights groups would have something to say about it, and quite rightly."

A lot of work in cloning animals around the world has fo cused on the economic benefits. Much research has been carried out on cattle, for example, in an attempt to continue good genetic lines. But Dr Griffin said there was no scientific value in cloning cats and, as such, much less research on the animals.

In eight years of high-profile animal research since it produced the world's first clone, the Roslin Institute has been approached around five times by wealthy pet-owners wanting to resurrect their animals.

Dr Griffin said the institute had always politely declined. He added that, internationally, pet-cloning had only rarely been attempted.

The Home Office, which regulates animal experiments, said that the work being done by Genetic Savings and Clone would not be licensed in this country. "The key consideration is the purpose for which animals are cloned," it said.

Dr Griffin said that scientists would be likely to stay well away from pet cloning services anyway.

"We would adhere to the principles of the Animal Procedures Act even if cloning were not covered by it," he said.