In a recent interview, Barbra Streisand, the famed singer, actress, and filmmaker who is one of few entertainers in the industry whose won Grammy, Emmy, and Tony Awards, sat down with Variety to discuss her lengthy career. However, perhaps one of the standout (and most bizarre) moments of the interview was when Streisand dropped this bomb on the interviewer: that two of her three Coton de Tulear dogs were actually cloned from the stomach and mouth cells of her former pet Samantha, who died in 2017 at 14-years-old. The cloned animals, Miss Scarlett and Miss Violet, got their names after “Streisand dressed the two dogs in red and lavender to tell them apart.”
However, despite being genetically identical to Samantha, the dogs are not identical to Samantha, let alone each other. “They have different personalities,” Streisand told Variety. “I’m waiting for them to get older so I can see if they have her brown eyes and her seriousness.”
In addition to the carbon-copy twins, Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett, Streisand also has a third dog, Miss Fanny, who she picked up from a breeder while waiting for the clones. As Variety explains, “While Streisand was waiting for the clones, her breeder brought another dog, whose mother had been named Funny Girl. Streisand was smitten. She adopted the new dog and called her Miss Fanny, which is how Fanny Brice’s dresser refers to the character in the movie.”
As other outlets have picked up the story, more information about the world of pet cloning has been uncovered. Per the New York Times, multiple companies offer the process, with its price at minimum costing $50,000 and taking on average 60 days.