On February 27, 2018 – five years ago today – Barbra Streisand (born 1942) revealed that she had cloned her dying dog Samantha (nicknamed “Sammie”) twice.   (No jokes here about Ms. Streisand singing “Send in the Clones.”) The revelation regarding the Samantha’s clones was made during an interview published in Variety five years ago today.  Samantha was a rare, curly haired Coton de Tuléar, a breed of small, white-haired dogs named for the city of Tuléar in the African island nation of Madagascar.  According to Kristine Lacoste, in an article published on the website Petful entitled Five Things to Know About Coton de Tuléar: “This breed is thought to have originated from a group of small white dogs that swam across the Malagasy channel following a shipwreck.” When Streisand’s Samantha (or should we say “Samantha Streisand”?) lay on her deathbed (blanket?) in 2017, Babs realized that she: “couldn’t bear to lose her.  I had to continue her DNA. There were no more curly-haired Cotons like Samantha — she was very rare. In order to get another I had to clone her.” In an article published in The New York Times on March 2, 2018, Barbra Streisand explained her decision […]