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US Horse Registry Forced To Accept Cloned Horses
kdryer39 writes "U.S. District Court Judge Mary Lou Robinson said she will sign an order requiring the American Quarter Horse Association to begin allowing cloned animals to be placed on its registry, according to the organization. A jury last month ruled that the horse association violated anti-monopoly laws by banning cloned animals. The quarter horse association issues and maintains a pedigree registry of American quarter horses, a popular breed associated with cowboys riding on the range in the 19th and early 20th centuries."
Damn I'm old.
...but good luck getting the Japanese horse racing community to follow that lead...
It's a quarter horse? What are the other 3/4?
I just had a flash of what the "coming out" issue of the 2nd half of the 21st century will be.
Whoopy, allow them into the registry with a mark of cloned, problem solved.
anyone can start up their own horse registry. if i ran a horse registry i likewise would not ant cloned or GMO animals to be a part of it.
Another indication that our civilization is doomed by greed. A couple of Texans want to get into the lucrative horse racing market and think their cloned animals will give them an unfair advantage over legitimate horse breeders. But the current national rules forbid it, quick sue to get the rules changed!
No other horse breeding registry allows cloned animals ...
That SHOULD have been all the defense needed, but alas, greed trumps all. Whats next, cloned pets at cat & dog shows?
Cloning is wrong because the Bible says so. A cloned horse does not have a soul, and is therefore an abomination. Also, the Sun revolves around the Earth, which is flat (this can be proven by looking at pictures of the Earth taken from space; it is clearly a flat, circular disc), and a woman's place is barefoot, pregnant, and wearing a burqa in front of the oven.
WTF do they have a monopoly on? A list?
If the Boy Scouts can keep gays out since they're a private organization, someone should be able to make a horse list according to their criteria.
Makes much more sense now.
Can't we just give this country back to the fuck'n indians and call it even?
I mean this whole thing started out pretty good for some people but now we have judges named mary fuckin lou!
Fuckin fuck me, you fucks.
If this registry were Microsoft, I wonder how the tone of the comments would change. Apparently, they have a monopoly on the registry. That opens them up for regulation. The cloned horses are legal, but their owners can't register them without creating a whole new register and trying to compete, which is too steep a hurdle because... it's a monopoly. So. As long as the registry is allowed to mark the horses as clones, I don't see a problem with this ruling. That way, the clone owners get to register their animals, and people who don't want clones in a bloodline can look it up and exclude it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Can we eat them?
"The horse association violated anti-monopoly laws."
For anyone to state with a straight face that there are enforceable anti-monopoly laws in 2013 America needs to immediately start a career as a comedian.
Sure, my cat says they're durn tasty!
Just like the theme to Mr. Ed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHbHpz3KwnM
If this registry were Microsoft
... then every time a horse on the registry got a virus, the registry would become corrupted.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Will they find a way to make the clones fail drug tests so they can't race?
Salient facts from TFA :-
What is more compelling is the statement from AQHA after the verdict :-
Seriously, now. If you don't like the rules of a voluntary association, work from within to change the rules. Or talk to them, negotiate to get them to accept you. Or leave, and form your own association with the rules you like. Going to court to force others to put up with you is so wrong.
And yes, I dont't see where is the monopoly. The plaintiffs can still whatever they want with their cloned horses, breed them, sell them, race them etc. They just can't be registered with the AQHA.
Now this story, I want to read again in a slashdot dupe. Just for the irony.
Why all the long faces?
I guess it would be smart to allow clones to register anyways, as if you are trying to track the breeding getting clones registered and in the books will really help compared to using clones in breeding instead the "ran under a truck" original. You know it will happen. The clne is basically a same horse genitically, right? So it's offspring would look the same in genitical test as the original? How can you really tell then if the resulting offspring really is a "genuine" or from a clone?
So, as I understand it, a cloned horse is where you take the DNA from a horse and put it into a donor egg to fertilize it with a complete chromosomal genome. Right, so, as we all know, the cell has other genetic material (mitochondrial DNA, for example). So, it's a fact that the initial cloned animal cell does not have ALL the same DNA that the initial fertilized egg had. If only the clone's chromosomal DNA is the same as the donor, then the cloned animal fertilized with nuclear DNA is not completely identical to the parent, and the clone WILL NOT produce the exact same genetic lineage that the host did -- Unless in the case of a female cloned via its own eggs? Registering studs means they of course do not produce their own eggs for cloning...
Mitochondria are key to the ATP energy cycle of cells; Thus the cloned animal and its offspring may not perform the same athletically as the parent.
In other words: It means that the Cloned Horses should be marked as such in the registry, and the Mother cell donor should be listed -- It's a whole other connectivity graph whereby instead of mixing the nucleic genomes, we are preserving the nucleic genome of the father and mixing it with the non-nucleic genome provided by the egg donor...
And you thought re-engineering a database to allow more sexes than just M or F was a pain? Yeah, I can see why the other registries would put off accepting clones.
Note: I work with artificial cybernetic genomes. I'm not a geneticist, but I felt this needed to be stated since I didn't see such posted above.
Today's cloning is not like calling Object.clone(); It's more like overriding most of the inherited object's methods having to do with appearance and structure, etc. but not all of them. Oh fine, it's like copying a complete car, but modifying the fuel injectors... Normal folks won't care but if you're racing them it might make a big difference.
Please do correct me if I'm wrong.
What about if they start tweaking it ?
Are we still limiting the registry to horses with only four legs?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
What will you do when you meet your clone for the very first time? I know what I would do, but the question is... Is it considered incest or masturbation?
I don't understand why you would go to the effort and expense to clone a common quarter horse, but some of the more rarer breeds, particularly those with closed stud books, have to resort to in-breading on occasion to maintain the breed. this is a good thing for them.
If you had ten clones of a proven track horse you could increase your winnings by driving the horse harder, at the risk of damaging them because you have backup copies. For the welfare of the animals, this should be banned from horse racing... or any other sport that involves animals being commanded by people.
The all still taste the same.
Judges can just apparently make any sort of illegal order they want these days. Let's just kill them all.
This case has been a farce. According to one news story, the plaintiff argued that since AQHA maintains monopoly control over registration of quarter horses, they are keeping the plaintiffs from competing. But competing in what? Not the space occupied by the AQHA. The plaintiffs are not trying to run a competing registry.
Even if the assocation has (quite naturally for this sort of thing) become a de facto monopoly, how does that justify the court in its imperial majestic wisdom arbitrarily deciding what rules the association can set? What's to stop the court from ordering them to accept zebras, or muskrats, for that matter? Nothing at all.
The horses are already registered, just bump the version number by 1.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
That way people who care can filter the cloned horses from the list.
"Arguing against government intervention for the sake of arguing is silly -- regulations exist because people make choices based on outdated values and judgments, and no private enterprise is completely isolated from its social setting."
And yet, companies like Monsanto have almost a completely un-checked monopoly without competition, and so extreme they can even come close to driving out the natural markets.
Google has the largest search engine, with barely any competition, Facebook, social media, AT&T over communications, etc. etc. Yet they are all left alone by government...WHY?
Not advocating any animal abuse, but how many of these horses would even exist if there was no demand from racing, or other "commanded by people" activities? I suspect that they'd be on the endangered species list without a lot of free space for wild horses.
Just another day in Paradise