Cloned Sniffer Dogs Begin Training

H0D_G writes "The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports that the world's first cloned sniffer dogs have begun their training in South Korea. The dogs, cloned from a successful golden retriever sniffer dog, were the result of a $320,000 AUD project."

Comments

Re:The only problem

[porcupine8]

You're still going to have that problem with clones. Small differences in prenatal conditions, one puppy getting more milk than another, random mutations - there will be some cloned dogs who aren't as good at it as the original, possibly quite bad at it. What will they do with those dogs?

Fun fact: Identical twins raised apart tend to be extremely, even eerily similar - as adults they often have the same careers, the same hobbies, dress similarly, etc. You'd think this was an argument for everything being highly genetically determined. However, identical twins raised together are NOT as similar as those raised apart - because they've grown up needing to assert their own identity separate from their twin. The differences in identical twins raised together shows how much environment has an impact.

Re:Why?

[AmonEzhno]

The issue, as I understand it from a friend who trains dogs for the TSA, the issue with training current sniffer dogs is that only about 1 in a few hundred of the potential dogs fits the profile they need. They look for dogs with obsessive personalities and dogs that have a very strong attachment to a specific item(toy). They use this toy they are fascinated with and use certain methods of conditioning to tie the scents of whatever the dog is trained to sniff out to the toy. So the hope with the cloned dogs I would suspect is that they think the personality traits of these dogs might be a genetic predisposition. So in other words if it works out, even 95% fail rate is better than the 99+% chance that they have to find a dog through normal screening methods.