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Is (will be) it technically possible – now or in near / far future?
Will such horses be legitimate to the GSB?
I’m looking forward to a "lively" discussion …
Can’t imagine it ever being accepted.
However, I think it is the way forward to provide exact copies for research into training and veterinary techniques.
I would like to see whole training yards, and races devoted to this – but doubt it will ever happen.
In general, I think it is wrong. Along with multiple embryo transfers that are becoming fashoinable in other spheres.If they can clone a sheep, then they can clone a horse.
Such an animal would not be accepted into the GSB as it would not be the result of natural cover.
I’d like to see AI introduced for thorughbreds, it seems to work ok for
sport horses, European trotters, quarter horses and standardbreds.I’m fairly certain (but don’t have time to check!) that they have been racing cloned mules in Idaho.
As Ven says, clones would not be currently accepted into the GSB. Cloning would also open up all sorts of new scientific issues for the sport – athletics has already seen dangers of blood doping and DNA modification; would it be cheating to race a horse that has genetic modification during the cloning process? How would cloning be policed?
My instinct is to not fiddle too much with the laws of nature – and it does sound as though the cloning process would not be a financially viable method of breeding for a long while. But it is always interesting to have options.
A friend of mine told me, that there should have an article in "The Vetenary Observer" (?) recently, that said: "… British gene-labatories have so much DNS that they could clone any tb of some significance from the past 20 years". Is this a joke?
For the last 20 years, DNA samples have been necessary for registering every thoroughbred – either through hair or, more recently, blood samples. There is a record of each horse, so that their offspring could be confirmed to a 98+% accuracy.
But I would be very doubtful that the samples sent in would be sufficient genetic information to be able to accurately clone – I also don’t know if the actual material is preserved or just the record of the genetic markers. As far as I know, actual cells are needed to start the process.
If it was tried and was successful would we see them digging up the remains of recently depated greats?
Imagine this line up (1m4F Epsom on Derby Day 2020)
Nijinsky
Mill Reef
Lamtarra
Generous
Sea Bird
Sir Ivor
The Minstrel
Galileo
Sinndar
High ChapparalOne thing for sure. We would never again have a debate about inbreeding vs outcrossing. Would you miss that, Parlo?
Well, themes are "in" and themes are "out". If we can allocate certain traits of a horse down to the haplotypes that specify them, there will be another way of tb-breeding and discussing themes like inbreeding an outcrossing in the traditional way will be obsolete.
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