Wednesday Wag: You can clone your dog like Barbra Streisand if you’ve got the cash

In a bonkers interview, Barbra Streisand revealed that she cloned her dog. And you can too! But be warned: It’ll cost you.

Something crazy happened in Barbra Streisand’s Varitey interview. The Broadway and movie queen talked to Variety about sexism in Hollywood, her legendary career as an actress, director, producer, and writer and her activism. But then right in the middle of the article, she dropped the bomb: Her dogs were cloned.

Wait. What? Yes, that’s right. Streisand and her husband James Brolin cloned mouth and stomach cells from their 14-year-old Coton de Tulear dog Samantha, who died in 2017. And behold, Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett were born.

Streisand dressed them up in different colors to tell them apart at first, which is how the pups got their colorful names. They also have Miss Fanny, whose mother was named Funny Girl and is a distant cousin of the clones.

“They have different personalities,” Streisand said of the cloned dogs. “I’m waiting for them to get older so I can see if they have her brown eyes and her seriousness.”

At least Streisand gets how mind-blowing this is. When she took a picture with her dogs for the Varity article, she even joked it should be captioned “Send in the Clones,” playing off the song “Send in the Clowns.”

According to The New York Times, the first dog was cloned in South Korea in 2005. In 2008, a California company and a South Korean lab held an auctioned for dogs to be cloned, and three puppies were born. By 2015, a South Korean lab called Sooam Biotech cloned over 600 dogs.

To make an already bizarre story just a little stranger, Streisand isn’t the first famous person to clone a dog. Joyce McKinney, who was in the infamous “manacled Mormon” case in the late ’70s, made headlines yet again in 2008 when she became one of the first people to clone their dog when she cloned her pit bull, Booger, and received five puppies.

So does the thought of never truly saying goodbye to your beloved pup sound intriguing to you? Well, I’ve got great news. You can clone your dog, too! It’ll only cost you a mere $50,000, according to The New York Times. And the jury’s out on how similar the cloned dogs will be to the original pup.

There are other downsides to dog cloning, believe it or not. First, there are ethical questions. Plus, the process is to create an embryo and place it in a surrogate dog. The egg donor and surrogate both require operations, and it’s not clear what happens to those dogs when they’re not needed anymore.

Next: Wednesday Wag: Lindsey Vonn opens up about how her dogs helped her

It’s a medical miracle. And it’s absolutely insane. So, fine, I kind of get it.