The NFL is still reeling from one of its most exciting trade deadlines ever. The Colts are betting they can make a Super Bowl run with Sauce Gardner. Jerry Jones is still making big moves. But we’re going to take a break from thinking about that for a moment. Because Tom Brady cloned his dog.
Umm, yeah. Here’s the People magazine headline that made me think I was hallucinating:
That is, in fact, real. In a statement released on Tuesday, Brady shared that his pit bull mix Junie is actually a clone of his dog Lua, who died in 2023. Junie was created (?) by a venture capital–backed biotech company called Colossal Biosciences using a blood sample Brady had taken from Lua shortly before she passed.
As you’d expect of a genetically engineered clone, the resemblance is uncanny. Here’s Lua in 2014 being completely adorable in an ad for UGG …
… and here’s Junie as a puppy accompanying Brady and his other dog Fluffy from the gym last year.
It goes without saying that, regardless of their origin, these are both Very Good Dogs.
That said … we can acknowledge this is a little strange, no? And this is not the first Brady story in recent years that has made me wonder how he’s grappling with the whole passage of time thing. This is a man who has been posting “Landslide” to his Instagram Story, after all. The thing about dogs is that they are perfect in all ways except for one, which is that one day they have to leave us for the big dog park in the sky. That grief is the price we pay for their love, and it’s part of the bargain you make when you become a pet owner. You can’t ever fully get them back—even cloning can’t replicate an animal’s personality—and in a sort of tragically beautiful way, the death of a pet reminds us of our own fragility. Cloning your dog, especially when there are so many dogs out there who need homes, feels like an attempt to run away from those realities.
Brady, for his part, said: “I love my animals. They mean the world to me and my family. A few years ago, I worked with Colossal and leveraged their noninvasive cloning technology through a simple blood draw of our family’s elderly dog before she passed.”
Brady’s love for his pets is clear, but if you’re also picking up a whiff of corporate messaging emanating from these sentiments, you’re not wrong. Brady’s Junie reveal coincided with Colossal Biosciences announcing that it had acquired another animal cloning firm, ViaGen Pets & Equine, which in recent years has cloned other celebrity dogs. If I’m being fully honest, I think we could all intuit that there’s nothing pure at the center of the Tom Brady–Barbra Streisand–Paris Hilton Venn diagram.
Colossal Biosciences, which was most recently valued at $10.2 billion after its Series C funding round last January, calls itself a “de-extinction” company. If you’ve ever heard of it before, it’s likely because it made a bunch of headlines last year for saying it had brought the dire wolf back from extinction, which is a questionable aim at best, and also, no, it didn’t. Currently, there is a whole section of its website devoted to its goal of resurrecting the woolly mammoth, an animal whose traits are suited for a wildly different global climate than the one we have now, and whose utility to Colossal seems mostly to be that it’s an extinct animal people have heard of. In March, the company claimed to have made major progress when it bred mice with “mammoth traits,” which mostly amounted to longer- and thicker-than-normal hair. There is no section of the website devoted to the one question I’d like answered, which is whether even one single person involved in this enterprise has seen Jurassic Park. From a design perspective, the website itself answers the question: What if Hypebeast did speciation charts?
That there are tens of thousands of existing species currently facing extinction does not seem to be Colossal’s concern. The company hasn’t just received funding from venture capitalists; private equity firms have also invested, and it’s not shocking that those industries, which function too much off greed and recklessness to worry about protecting the existing world, would want to make-believe the possibility of starting anew. But, man, did Tom Brady have to go and get his pets all mixed up in this mess?
I know it was a girls’ trip, but with every passing day, I’m more and more surprised Brady didn’t find his way onto that rocket with Katy Perry and her daisy. Brady is a football genius, but his kryptonite is either Eli Manning or the daffiest investment schemes you’ve ever heard of.
We are blogging on NFL trade deadline day about an NFL main character, so we should try to find a football takeaway. Here it is: Every year at this time, several team owners make it exceedingly clear that their wealth, status, and power do not imbue them with sound judgment. And in his own way, Brady paid homage to that tradition by using the love he has for his pets to shill for a group of sketchy scientists trying to Jurassic Park the woolly mammoth. You’d think if Brady were getting this into the cloning game, he’d at least throw the Raiders a bone and ask his friends to cook up an extra Charles Woodson or two.
