Cloning Cutting Horses

[Oldtimer]

I don't know if I buy into this stuff or not- pretty soon we can all ride identical "cookie cutter made" horses.....Guess I'm just getting old besides being old fashioned

Posted on Fri, Mar. 31, 2006



Champion cutting horses are sending in the clones

By BARRY SHLACHTER
STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER

Two high-dollar Texas cutting horses have been cloned, one commercially, the other through a Texas A&M research program, their owners announced Thursday.
Horses had been successfully cloned before, as have sheep, cattle, cats, deer and a dog.
But these were the first champion stock, triggering expectations that they will create a profitable niche in the cloning industry, which has been restrained by a voluntary moratorium on the consumption of milk or meat from cloned livestock.
The clone of 26-year-old Royal Blue Boon, which has earned $381,764 in winnings and more than $2.5 million from breeding, was born to a surrogate mare on Feb. 19 in Purcell, Okla., according to owner Elaine Hall of Weatherford and an Austin cloning company, ViaGen.
Created at a cost of $150,000, Royal Blue Boon Too will never be trained to compete but would be used eventually for breeding, said Hall of Larry Hall Cutting Horses, a breeding company. Milton Bradford of Encore Genetics of Weatherford, ViaGen's exclusive marketing agent for horse cloning, predicted that Boon Too's offspring could fetch $100,000 to $150,000 apiece.
On Feb. 12, the first of five clones of Smart Little Lena was born at a Whitesboro breeding facility, said Bill Freeman, the largest shareholder in the syndicate that owns the champion stallion. Lena, which scooped up $749,000 in competition winnings in two seasons and generated $38 million for breeding services at $20,000 a pop, was replicated in cooperation with A&M's equine-cloning laboratory.
Freeman, in a telephone interview from Rosston, which is between Decatur and Gainesville, said the ownership group had not decided what to do with the five, but added: "It would be my suggestion, and strictly my suggestion, to sell three. And I would sell those overseas, to South America, Australia and Europe."
ViaGen disclosed that a clone of another cutting horse champion, Tap O Lena, owned by trainer Lindy Burch of Weatherford, was born March 9. Two clones of a third, Bet Your Blue Boons, are due "any day," and three from unnamed horses are expected later this year. Many more mares pregnant with clones are due next year, it said.
The Humane Society of the United States condemned the development, saying it supports scientific advances with a legitimate social value, "something that is entirely lacking in the case of commercial cloning of horses." In a statement, Wayne Pacelle, the group's president, said cloning has an "inordinately high" failure rate with survivors suffering a wide range of chronic health conditions.
But ViaGen officials and researchers in the field say that the worst medical problems, including oversized fetuses in cattle, have been largely overcome with improved techniques. With the cutting horses, it achieved a 30 percent success rate, which is similar to that with cattle, they said.
The latest development is more a commercial milestone than a scientific one.
"We have incorporated the horse business into our profitability outlook," said Mark Walton, ViaGen's president. "It is a more immediately accessible market because there are no regulatory issues. We expect the horse business to be the major part of the market until the agricultural market opens to us and develops."
Aside from cutting horses, ViaGen said it is also cloning high-value dressage and barrel-racing horses. However, the most valuable horses, racing thoroughbreds, can only be bred naturally, according to the sport's governing body.
Royal Blue Boon was cloned by taking skin cells from its neck. DNA extracted from the cells was inserted into enucleated oocytes -- eggs with the genetic material removed. (The oocytes had been removed from reproductive organs sold to ViaGen by two horse-slaughter plants.) The resulting embryos were transferred to a recipient mare.
Hall said in an interview that profit was not her motivation.
"I am a traditional, old-fashioned person," said Hall, whose late husband operated Fort Worth's Hall Mechanical Contractors before becoming active in cutting horses.
"But if you don't stay up with the latest technology, you are going to be left in the dust," she said. "I thought it would be an injustice not to allow [Royal Blue Boon] this opportunity to perpetuate this bloodline, which we were not able to do before."

[RoperAB]

Well AI took a while to become accepted as normal. Im thinking this is sort of the same thing.
Be great if they could or when they get the bugs out of the system.

[Jinglebob]

My college graduate son, just told me that this colt will have the same DNA, that will alos be 26 years old. In other words, the colt will be 26 years old when it's born. According to him. as we age our DNA gets shorter and shorter.

If that is true, this colt might only live for a year or two.

Whats the point in that?

Sounds to me like someone is about to get took to the cleaners.

It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature!

[Faster horses]

Like with anything, regardless of what is said, "follow the money."

[Denny]

Well no wonder no one is following me.

[EastTexasGal]

I would never invest in a Clone. AQHA, they say will not register the foals..but heck they also said at one time they would never register embryo transfers and now they do. It is fast becoming a rich mans game to try and compete with registered stock. I will always say though, a clone is still just a horse and the ones they are cloning did not always win on their own attributes, politics plays a big part in showing horses. Been in it way to long to not see that. I hope that they get real and see what science is doing to our animals....where did HYPP come from?? just out of the blue it is only Impressive bred horses that has it??....Lots of questions that just goes back to politics and folks with way to much money to see they are destroying what we still have.

Thats a Easty scenerio......Who else has an oppinion??

Huggss,
Easty

[Faster horses]

Here is the little bit I know. A little gal from here worked for Bill Freeman a couple of years ago. Of course, Bill Freeman owns Smart Little Lena. This girl said it was the horses that made Bill Freeman, not the other way around. The horses are awesome, according to her. Bill Freeman is not.

[PPRM]

Cloning, heck horse people have been trying to do that for years with inbreeding, LOL.....


The Clone will never be something I am interested in. I really believe the Mare makes the horse...She works on the foal from the day it hits the ground. The clone would miss out on a lot of this,


Just my two cents,


PPRM

[RoperAB]

One thing for sure is that today is the "Good old days" as far as well bread horses being very affordable and availible to everybody.
JMO But we have it better now than any other time in North American history.

[Jinglebob]

If cloning would work, how can there be so much difference between full brothers and sisters? Don't they all have the same genetic make up, to start with?

If I get a good horse, I'm almost afraid to try and reproduce that horse as in the past, I've never gotten one as good as the first one, probably for a lot of reasons.

Again I say, it's not nice to fool with mother nature.

[Manitoba_Rancher]

I think this is wrong, but could become more acceptable.

[CattleRMe]