Scientists Clone Horse

The Night Watchman writes "Italian scientists have produced the world's first horse clone, according to Yahoo News. Racing is likely to become slightly more interesting in the coming years..."

Comments

Racing likely to become more interesting?

[James A. A. Joyce]

I don't think that cloning will make much difference to current methods of selective breeding; after all, selective breeding works just fine as it is, and I don't think that horses can really be "improved" any further without some large anomalistic genetic change in a large proportion of the species.

Re:From a working horse owner's perspective

[Zarquon]

Well, while that seems to be excluding many of the draft breeds, arguably they are being enhanced for function. Horses have 4 mainstream uses at the moment:
1) Racing.
2) Showing/Jumping/et al.
3) Herding/farm work.
4) Pleasure riding.

I'm on the eastern seaboard, so I almost swapped #3 and #4.

As for horses not right in the head, the worst ones I've encountered have _always_ been thoroughbreds off the track. Not that the others are all brilliant, but the thoroughbreds were almost exclusively ditzey.

The one thing that don't mention about this process, is while it may conserve genetic material, there is also a lot of environmental impact in a horse's development. A clone of a horse will look the same, but probably won't behave or perform the same way.