You sign one of the most conflicting contracts imaginable when you get a dog.

In exchange for years of loyalty, friendship, and the dopiest joy with your furry best friend, you accept that, one day, they will break your heart into a million pieces when they, like all good things in life, die. After the countless, delightful memories they give you, you understand that you have to accept the finality of their fragile existence and say goodbye to them with dignity and grace. The very least you could do is not twist the happy memory of them into something that perverts the laws of nature while simultaneously pretending like everything is fine.

It's an unspoken duty to your dog and the unwavering commitment they had to you while they lived. It's a duty to your own heart. If you can't manage to accept this unofficial contract, then you shouldn't get a dog. You're not strong or trustworthy enough for such responsibility.

Enter self-professed and proud weirdo, Tom Brady.

In a new interview with People, the seven-time Super Bowl champion revealed that after his dog, Lua, died in 2023, he responded to his family's devastation by cloning them into a similar-looking, yet not identical, dog named Junie. You'll also be entirely unsurprised to learn that Brady played God (with the money he earned from playing a children's game) with a biotech company in which he is an investor.

It's not enough that Brady Dr. Frankenstein'd a beloved and innocent canine friend. He has to try to hawk some brazen cash in his deal with the devil, too. Because of course he does.

More from People:

“I love my animals. They mean the world to me and my family,” the former NFL star said. “A few years ago, I worked with Colossal [the biotech company] and leveraged their non-invasive cloning technology through a simple blood draw of our family's elderly dog before she passed.”

The company “gave my family a second chance with a clone of our beloved dog,” Brady continued, adding that he is “excited how Colossal and Viagen's tech together can help both families losing their beloved pets while helping to save endangered species.”

There's so much to unpack here. For one, I love how Brady uses the word "leveraged" as if he's a mid-level manager delivering a bog-standard PowerPoint presentation about Q3 earnings. If there's one way to sell your definitely-at-least-somewhat-evil technology to an unsuspecting populace — many of whom will trust you mainly because you threw lots of touchdowns — it's by utilizing euphemistic corporate speak that defangs language.

For the other, I LOVE how Brad speaks like cloning the beloved family dog is a reasonable and healthy position more people should start taking up. Never mind that cloned dogs usually have completely different personalities from their, er, predecessors? Ancestors? You get the point. The cloned dog just looks like the long-time friend who trusted you and loved you like no other living thing will ever trust you or love you. The process is tantamount to reanimating a dead loved one in videos and asking generative AI to fill in the blanks based on text prompts you fill out.

It's soulless dreck that will never allow you to really grieve and move on.

If you're someone who is OK with diving into that toxic, mental well of nostalgia because clearly nothing is sacred to you, well, I'm judging you. No questions asked.

Dearest readers, this is what happens when one of the largest broadcast networks in the world gives you more than one-third of a billion dollars to explain the very concept of the Super Bowl, even though there are people who do that same job a lot better for a fraction of the price. You start to think you're invincible. You start to believe the mortal, natural laws of life and death that exist for a reason don't apply nearly as much to you as they do to other people.

You're better than everyone, after all. You can bend those rules just a little. Don't worry about it.

So, you turn the happy memory of one of human beings' greatest friendships into a dystopian horror story. Then, you bury your head in the sand about the line you crossed. Tom Brady wasn't strong enough to accept the deal he made with his dog.

Even without this extra context, calling him weird for cloning his dog is being charitable, at best.

This article originally appeared on For The Win: Tom Brady is weird for cloning his dog

Reporting by Robert Zeglinski, For The Win / For The Win

USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect