Beware the canine clones!

An Upper West Side man loved his pet, Astro, so much, he made a hat out of the pooch’s fur — and cloned him into two more dogs.

Now he defiantly lets his copycat collies run around Central Park without a leash — and neighbors say dogs are terrorizing the Upper West Side.

“This is a tragedy waiting to happen,” said one man who claims the dogs charged at his puppy and bit his hand. “The city knows about this problem and does nothing. The law has no teeth, so to speak.”

The clones’ elusive master, Gary Rintel, 45, who often dawdles a block ahead of or behind his marauding mutts, readily admits he flouts the leash law and has paid $2,000 in tickets in the past year.

“If you were a dog, would you want to live with a rope around your neck?” he told The Post. “I don’t think most people care about their dogs’ happiness. Sometimes I’m guilty of breaking that law.”

A single writer and self-described trust-fund layabout, Rintel was featured on a reality show for his worship of Astro, a short-haired collie/Great Pyrenees mix.

Rintel had Astro’s DNA frozen twice and then paid $140,000 four years ago to a lab to insert the DNA into a donor egg that would be implanted into a surrogate.

That’s how Cosmo and Retro were born 3 1/2 years ago.

Parkgoers have been fuming over the dogs’ bad behavior — and Rintel’s — ever since.

“The second I see that guy, I make sure to cross the street,” said Jarrod Mittan, 29. “He ignores his dogs as they’re bounding down the sidewalk, and he screams at them as though they understand what he’s saying.”

Neighbors say the clones have bolted into buildings along West 96th Street to chase down other pooches, and doormen are always pushing the troublemaking twosome out.

“They look like lions in the jungle. They roam free,” said one super.

“We call them ‘the clones,’ ” said a dog owner who claims the two pooches came out of nowhere and attacked his black Lab puppy in Central Park. When the man tried to intervene, one of the clones bit his hand, he said.

Rintel eventually walked over to apologize, the victim said.

“The guy said to me, ‘I’m sorry, my dogs have never done anything like that before,’ ” said the park user. “Then he walked away — with the dogs still off the leash!”

Park rules mandate that dogs must be on leashes between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m.

Rintel’s former dog-walker Melinda Pillon told The Post she broke that rule in July, and the clones bit a cyclist.

But Rintel defended his dogs as “good boys” and said the walker wasn’t paying attention to them. He denied that the Labrador’s owner had ever been bitten.

“It seems like dirty pool to manufacture an incident just because you’re upset my dog jumped on yours,” said Rintel, who takes the collies for daily, three-hour jaunts through the park so they can chase rats and squirrels.

“They’re not threatening or dangerous dogs. They’re playful and they’re under check,” he said. “The idea that two dogs are savaging the Upper West Side isn’t true.”