A
Anonymous
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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."
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."
:cry2: