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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..."
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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.
Bash script for FP whores
ccBiscuit (carbon copy)
Either that or a glitch in the Matrix...they've changed something...oh yeah, the new Apple license!
Gate1: Sea Biscuit Odds 1/1
Gate2: Sea Biscuit Odds 1/1
Gate3: Sea Biscuit Odds 1/1
Gate4: Sea Biscuit Odds 1/1
etc...
No, it's "My Little Clony"
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Out of a total of 841 reconstructed embryos, only 22 developed to advanced embryos within about a week. Seventeen of those were introduced into nine mares, resulting in four pregnancies, but only one, Prometea, developed to full term.
Jeez... if you really want that genetically enhanced captain of the football team genius scientist Richard Gere looking son you better start soon!
"Engineers do the work of man, Physicists do the work of God"
Clone Ranger.
They did it to make a...
Battalion of Italian Stallions
har har har *hiccup*
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And no one can talk to a clone of a horse of course
That is, of course, unless the clone of the horse is a clone of the famous Mister Ed!
"She's the clone!"
"No, _she's_ the clone!"
Thoroughbred's don't even allow artificial insemination (AI) much less embryo transplant, they are strictly live-cover only.
In other breeds/diciplines it's fine. I'm not a breeding expert, but my wife and I own a stallion and we've shipped semen a few times to mare owners. A friend of ours runs a large operation this ships frozen and cooled equine semen. It's pretty interesting, actually. The technology is pretty advanced, and the recordkeeping / auditing requirements when dealing with million-dollar horses is staggering.
"The most obvious use is to give a sterile animal or animals that die or can't breed because of some disease a chance to reproduce," Galli said.
;-)
Thus doing away with that pesky natural selection. Not that that's a bad thing...
No sig
have they isolated the genes that will make me hung like one?
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
You all have no idea how important this is!
Don't you see - now, after we have beaten any given dead horse (e.g. Microsoft is evil, X is slow, ??AA sucks) into a slurry, we can salvage its DNA, clone it, raise the clone to maturity, kill it, and continue to beat it some more!
This invention has singlehandedly saved the Internet!
www.eFax.com are spammers
Sadly, Wired magazine had a sharp drop in sales in the month of July when customers confused the cover featuring the cloned horse for Janet Reno.
"Derp de derp."
So this statement really irritates me:Unfortunately, this researcher is probably right on the money, literally. There is huge money in show horses, just like there is in purebred show dogs. The problem is how selective breeding -- in both cases -- has resulted in an animal that is useless for any real purpose.
Appaloosas get bred for particular patterns of spots, Quarter Horses get bred for very specific ratios of body parts, Arabians are bred to hold themselves "just so"... you get the picture. Thoroughbreds, bred for speed, may be the only horses that are commercially bred for something that is even remotely "natural" to a horse's instincts -- and even they are broken down and "retired" at an age when a working horse is just getting started.
What you see, way too often, is a horse that looks pretty, but is completely screwed up in the head. And that's with traditional breeding (and I'm including the straw o'semen in the "traditional" category). I can only imagine the neurotic, unpredictable horses that will come from cloning the "best" show horses. They'll be useless for any actual work, probably won't be able to reproduce without assistance (already a problem today), and will be a danger to their rider and anyone nearby.
Give me a field-bred "grade" horse over a "show" horse any day. It's like our dogs -- we have two mixed-breed puppies (half Jack Russell) that are sharp as a tack. The big black dog that got dumped as a puppy is the loyal protector of the household. And the $700 Schnauzer is the stupidest creature on the face of God's green earth. Show dog? No thanks, I'll take the mutt in the corner.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.