What characteristics of plants allow them to be cloned relatively easily, whereas cloning in animals ...

There are several reasons why cloning is easier in plants than in animals. First, plants can be easily propagated through vegetative reproduction. In addition, plant cells are often totipotent, which makes the cloning process much easier because there is no need to reprogram the nucleus. Animal cloning can be accomplished through parthenogenesis in rare instances, but is primarily accomplished through reproductive cloning and somatic cell nuclear transfer. This process requires the transfer of a nucleus from a donor cell to a recipient egg, and is often complicated by the incomplete reprogramming of the genome because donor cells are no longer totipotent as in plant cells. Cell differentiation in animals therefore limits the success rate of somatic cell nuclear transfer and the formation of viable organisms from such techniques.