Barbra Streisand loves her dogs so much that she had her 14-year-old dog Samantha cloned, just before it died last year. The multi-award-winning actress, singer, and songwriter recently revealed in an interview with Variety that she had cells taken from her Coton de Tulear dog's stomach and mouth. The results are her two fur babies named Miss Violet and Miss Scarlet. The two dogs live with her in her Malibu home.
While cloning is still a controversial scientific process, Streisand was quoted by Variety as saying, "They have different personalities... I'm waiting for them to get older so I can see if they have her brown eyes and her seriousness." While the exact figures and reasons were not stated, companies like South Korea's Sooam Biotech and ViaGen in Texas offer this cloning service to those that can afford roughly around $50,000-$100,000 per animal.
According to an interview with Scientific American, John Woestendiek, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Dog, Inc.," while the clone will be a very close physical match, the cloners will usually admit that personality cannot be duplicated. This means there is a larger chance that the behavior that a pet owner once loved about their dog might not apply to their new cloned pets, as can also be the case with twins.
Streisand told Variety that she is still waiting to see if Miss Scarlet and Miss Violet inherited Samantha's "brown eyes and her seriousness."
Researchers from South Korea first announced in 2005 that they had successfully cloned a male Afghan hound named Snuppy after three years of experimentation and more than a thousand eggs used as samples. A yellow Labrador Retriever served as the surrogate mother. In 2008, The New York Times wrote a report about three cloned puppies that were born in South Korea. According to ViaGen, the cloning process usually takes up to 60 days.
Should a pet lover wish not to go down the same lane as Streisand, one can also opt to preserve their pet's genes for $1,600, for future use.
