WHEN Keith Campbell and Ian Wilmut and their team at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh announced in 1996 that they had cloned Dolly the Sheep there was much speculation about where this new Scottish technology might take us.
Fast forward 22 years and now we know – the age of the celebrity pet clone is now upon us.
It was reported in the USA yesterday that Hollywood superstar Barbra Streisand has just paid a rumoured $100,000-plus to have her pet dog cloned not once but twice.
The actress, singer, producer and director told Hollywood trade magazine Variety that two of her three current dogs were cloned from her beloved pet of 14 years, Samantha, a beautiful specimen of the Coton de Tulear breed.
According to the report, Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett were cloned from cells taken from the mouth and stomach of Samantha, who died last year.
When she first took them home, Streisand dressed the dogs in lavender and violet sashes so she could tell them apart – hence their names.
The diva clearly likes to keep things in the family – Streisand’s other Coton de Tulear, Miss Fanny, is a distant cousin of Samantha.
The name comes from the fact that the dog was originally called Funny Girl, and in that 1960s movie Streisand played Fanny Bryce.
“They have different personalities,” told Variety. “I’m waiting for them to get older so I can see if they have her brown eyes and her seriousness.”
Cloning a pet first happened in the USA in 2004. The first commercially cloned pet was a cat named Little Nicky, cloned by industry pioneers Genetic Savings & Clone of California for an anonymous woman for the fee of $50,000 - the current fee per clone is believed to be still around $50,000 each with difficult ‘subjects’ costing more.
The first cloned dog, Snuppy the Afghan hound, was born in 2005 in South Korea. Speaking ahead of this weekend’s Oscar ceremony – she won the best Actress Award for Funny Girl in 1969 – the 75-year-old Streisand spent most of the interview with Variety excoriating President Donald Trump and blasting the male sexual predators who have disgraced her industry.
Trump “embodies the nasty remarks he makes about other people. He’s a liar. He’s crooked,” she says.
It’s the revelation that she has cloned her pet that has caused most grief for Streisand, however, with the organisation People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) suggesting she should not have done so.
PETA President Ingrid Newkirk said: “We all want our beloved dogs to live forever, but while it may sound like a good idea, cloning doesn’t achieve that—instead, it creates a new and different dog who has only the physical characteristics of the original.
“Animals’ personalities, quirks, and very ‘essence’ simply cannot be replicated, and when you consider that millions of wonderful adoptable dogs are languishing in animal shelters every year or dying in terrifying ways when abandoned, you realise that cloning adds to the homeless-animal population crisis.
“And because cloning has a high failure rate, many dogs are caged and tormented for every birth that actually occurs—so that’s not fair to them, despite the best intentions. We feel Barbra’s grief at losing her beloved dog but would also love to have talked her out of cloning.”
Streisand is well known for her love of dogs. There was no doubting Streisand’s love for Samantha when she died: “She was always with me; the last 14 years she went everywhere I went,” she told the Associated Press. “She was at every performance. It was like losing a child. It was kind of awful.”
The Misses Scarlett and Violet are proving a balm for her, however, and the actress has lost none of her renowned waspish humour.
The actress famously once performed a parody of the Stephen Sondheim hit ‘Send in the Clowns’ about Donald Trump, except she called it ‘Who is this Clown.’ Apparently during the recent photo shoot, Streisand joked that a portrait with her three dogs should be captioned ‘Send in the Clones’.
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