The most interesting thing about Tom Brady’s dogs was always that they came from shelters. Four of them, over the years, none of them bought.
The most interesting thing about them now is that one of them exists twice.
In November 2025, Brady revealed that he had worked with the biotech company Colossal Biosciences to clone Lua, the brown pit bull mix he and Gisele Bündchen adopted from their local shelter in 2014, and who died in December 2023. Blood was collected before her death. The resulting puppy is named Junie.
So the story of these dogs has quietly become a story about something else: what an enormous amount of money can and cannot buy back.
The dogs, in order
Lua came first, in 2014, from a shelter. She was the one people knew, partly because she appeared alongside Brady in a UGG campaign, walking a beach and playing fetch while he modeled boots. She was a rescue in a national ad, which in 2014 was not nothing.
Scooby, a beagle, arrived the following year, also a rescue.
Fluffy, a small terrier, was Bündchen’s, adopted from the Los Angeles-based rescue Wags and Walks. When she introduced Fluffy on social media, she thanked the organization for letting them rescue “this little angel,” said the kids were over the moon, and called Fluffy pure joy.
Onyx, a black pit bull mix, made four. Brady’s running joke was that Onyx was less his dog than Lua’s, brought home as her playmate.
Four dogs, four adoptions, in a household with the means to buy any dog in the world. That is the part of this story worth keeping.
Bündchen has said the thing that most rescue owners eventually arrive at: she thought she was giving these dogs a better life, and came to believe her family got the better end of the deal.
Then Lua died, and Brady did something new
Lua died in December 2023. In November 2025, Brady disclosed that Colossal Biosciences had cloned her from blood taken while she was alive, and that he now has her genetic copy.
He is an investor and adviser to the company, which is best known for its de-extinction work, and he framed the announcement as being about the future of the field.
The clone is not Lua. This is not a philosophical objection, it is a biological one, and it is worth being precise about because the marketing around pet cloning is not.
What a cloned dog actually is
A clone is a genetic twin born years later. That is the entire promise, and it is a real one: same DNA, often a similar look, sometimes an eerily familiar posture or coat pattern.
What it does not deliver:
The same dog. Personality in dogs is built from genes plus early experience, socialization, training, illness, injury, and everything that happened in a specific life. A twin born a decade later into a different household is a different animal wearing a familiar face.
The same markings, necessarily. Coat patterns in many animals are not fully determined by DNA. Cloned pets have famously come out looking noticeably different from their originals.
A grief solution. This is the part welfare organizations keep pointing at. A clone does not resume a relationship. It starts a new one, with an animal who will be measured against a ghost for its whole life.
The part the announcement skips: the other dogs
Cloning a dog requires biology that has to come from somewhere. Egg donors. Surrogate mothers who are implanted, carry a pregnancy, and give birth. Multiple attempts are typical, because success rates are low.
The industry rarely says much about what happens to those animals afterward. Animal welfare groups, including the ASPCA and the Humane Society of the United States, have opposed commercial pet cloning on exactly these grounds, and they have all made a second argument that lands harder here than almost anywhere else:
There are millions of adoptable dogs in shelters right now. Which is precisely where Lua came from.
That is the tension at the center of this story, and it is not a gotcha. It is just the shape of the thing. A man built a family around four shelter dogs, one of them became famous for it, and when she died he spent what a shelter dog costs many thousands of times over to obtain her genome again, while the shelter that gave her to him is still full.
What this actually means for you
The realistic answer is that this is not a decision you will face. Commercial pet cloning runs to tens of thousands of dollars, is offered by a small handful of companies, and takes months.
But the impulse behind it is entirely ordinary, and it is worth naming. Everybody who has lost a dog has wanted the dog back. The technology just makes the wanting expensive and literal.
What the science says is that you cannot get the dog back, because the dog was never only the DNA. The dog was the DNA plus fourteen years of your specific house, your specific walks, and your specific voice at the door. That is not in the blood sample.
What newer research adds
Pet cloning has been commercially available since the mid-2000s, and the results have been consistent enough to be boring: clones are genetic twins, not resurrections. Cloned animals can differ in coat markings, and they can differ substantially in temperament, because temperament is not a purely genetic output.
The welfare questions have not been resolved either. Low success rates mean multiple egg donors and surrogates per attempt, and the industry publishes very little about what happens to those animals. That is the reason the major U.S. welfare organizations still oppose the practice, and no scientific development since has changed the arithmetic.
The thing worth taking from the Brady story, then, is not the clone. It is the first half: four dogs from shelters, in a house that could have bought anything, and the woman who noticed that they were the ones who got rescued.
