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Cloned Drug-Sniffing Dogs Prove Successful In South Korea
Rexdude writes "A prized drug-sniffing dog at Incheon Airport in South Korea was cloned four years ago, and now the clones have proven to be much more successful at becoming sniffer dogs themselves compared to regular dogs. Not as controversial as human cloning, but are we going to see genetic copyrights on prized animal breeds in the future?"
No wonder, they are they smartest dogs on this planet. And really good friends. And really kids friendly.
In most places they don't even allow racehorses to be bred by artificial insemination, they insist on live cover only.(*) That stops a few issues, swapping a whole stallion is harder than swapping a test-tube of semen, so it cuts down on fraud. Also, semen can be thinned and used to breed more mares, so the already rather inbred population would get even worse if everybody was breeding their mares to just a handful of top stallions. Natural breeding puts an upper limit on the number of foals you can get from one stallion. You could clone your horse if you wanted, but there's no way that horse would be allowed to be registered in the stud books, so you could never race it or breed other racehorses from it.
What I have seen proposed is allowing a gelding to be cloned, once, so that you have a genetically identical stallion which can be used to breed from in place of the gelding. Currently racehorse owners just see dollar signs hanging between their stallions legs, even though it takes years to find out if your stallion is one of the few that will actually make any money at stud after retiring from racing. Since stallions can be violently unpredictable animals, it would make racing safer if they could all be gelded at the start, and just the few that are worthwhile cloned for breeding.
Cloning famous past horses might be a disappointment anyway. Some of the record times those horses put in back then are routine these days. Although it would answer some questions about how much of that is improved training vs genetics.
* - There are exceptions. The local racing board here allows an exemption for stallions who've been injured in a manner that prevents breeding naturally. The exemptions are granted on a case by case basis, and the stallion has to be excited by the mare he's going to be bred to, with the semen is transferred to the mare within 5 minutes.