PETA wants celebrities to stop cloning their dogs

As much as people love their pets, even PETA thinks there’s a point when they should let the animals go.

Following the revelation that Barbra Streisand had her late dog Samantha cloned twice, the organization’s president said she would rather pet owners not follow the singer’s lead.

In a statement to Page Six on Tuesday, 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 realize 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, 75, opened up about her ownership of two cloned dogs in an interview with Variety published Tuesday morning. The pets, Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett, were cloned from the star’s 14-year-old Coton du Tulear Samantha, who died in 2007 (the singer also owns a third dog who is a distant cousin of Samantha).

“They have different personalities,” Streisand told the publication. “I’m waiting for them to get older so I can see if they have her [Samantha’s] brown eyes and seriousness.”

Streisand isn’t the first celebrity to come forward as the owner of a cloned dog. In the spring of 2016, Page Six reported that media billionaire Barry Diller and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg had cloned his beloved Jack Russell terrier, Shannon, into two pups.

Cloning dogs can cost upwards of $100,000.

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