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?"

Comments

Dogs are old hat!

[L4t3r4lu5]

Bees are where it's at

Power

[Tsingi]

They should use their powers for good. Give every child a clone of Lassie.

Not much difference

[hackertourist]

Pure-bred dogs are bred in such a small population that they were getting pretty close to being clones anyway.

Have racehorses been cloned?

[wisebabo]

They are the most expensive non-Human animals right? Other than perhaps extinct animals that people want to bring back like the Saber-tooth tiger, the wooly mammoth and the Dodo (not). What about truffle finding pigs?

Actually maybe certain transgenic animals that have had their DNA altered to express useful drugs (like goats with insulin laced milk) might be more expensive.

Anyway, is it illegal race a cloned racehorse? Will they be requiring genetic tests on all winning racehorses? What about race horses that have already died (Seabiscuit?).

Re:Have racehorses been cloned?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Labrador retriever

[Dark Lord of Ohio]

No wonder, they are they smartest dogs on this planet. And really good friends. And really kids friendly.

Re:Labrador retriever

[Rogerborg]

Yes, yes, $(YOUR_FAVOURITE_BREED) is a proud, noble dog. Alert, intelligent, sociable, $(YOUR_FAVOURITE_BREED) is a loyal companion if correctly raised. Behavioural problems with $(YOUR_FAVOURITE_BREED) are inevitably the fault of the owner.

Save it for Wikipedia, where thanks to gushing starry eyed defensive owners, every other breed page reads exactly like $(YOUR_FAVOURITE_BREED)'s page.

Re:Labrador retriever

[Dark Lord of Ohio]

Yes, my dog is proud, inteligent, loyal and you don't have such friend and you will never have, unless you have Nintendo DS/DSi/3DS and will get yourself and play Nintendogs.

Of course there will

[msobkow]

Monsanto has already patented their GMOs. Silly to ask if somethings goign to happen when it's already done.

Re:Of course there will

[sosume]

Impossible, the prior art is obvious! In the case of Monsanto one could argue that the seeds have been specifically engineered. However, in this case, it is a direct clone of a naturally bred dog. You cannot get a patent on a copy?

Electronics aren't much better

[msobkow]

I remember the Toronto airport security testing out one of the electronic sniffers. It was supposed to be much more sensitive than dogs are.

The problem is, it was too sensitive. It turns out that after a few decades of smuggling, pretty much every surface in the baggage handling are has been exposed to drugs or explosives at some time or other, so the electronic sniffer kept going off.

When they turned down the sensitivity, it was no better than a dog.

Case in point: 90 percent of U.S. bils carry traces of cocaine. The fact that a sniffer or a dog "goes off" only justifies further investigation; it's far from proof.

Do Cloned Drug-Sniffing Dogs Taste Better?

[SpaghettiPattern]

How do they prove successful? Do Cloned Drug-Sniffing Dogs simply taste better?

Re:Questionable at best.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why we should use cats instead: cats wouldn't respond to cues from the handler.

Re:Copyright != Patent

[alexandre_ganso]

I swear I read GATTACA