A sinister-sounding partnership between "horse-breeding and marketing firm" Encore Genetics and ViaGen has just produced the first commercially cloned horse in the United States, according to National Geographic. Royal Blue Boon Too is apparently priced-to-go at $150,000, compared with the original (um, mother?) Royal Blue Boon, who at 26 years old is now past the traditional breeding age. Italian scientists made the first horse clone in 2003, and several more have been cloned since then.
ViaGen says it expects to produce seven cloned foals this year. It has also collected and frozen tissue samples from more than 75 champion horses for future cloning.... To encourage sales, the company even gives horse owners a $60,000 discount on the price of a second clone of the same animal.
In sharing this information with you, I'm trying to restrain myself in the use of exclamation points and exclamatory cusswords, partly to hide the fact that I've apparently been asleep for the past few years as cloning has become--what? standard practice? An acceptable method of horse-production?
Not entirely. While the American Quarter Horse Association in Amarillo, Texas will register cloned horses, the Oklahoma Quarter Horse Racing Association is trying to ban cloned horses from Oklahoma's racetracks, and the Jockey Club, the breed registry for North American thoroughbred horses, will not register clones.
Perhaps more problematic has been the particulars of the cloning source material. The company clones horses by means of nuclear transfer, where the DNA of the presumably champion horse is transferred into eggs that have been stripped of their own material, incubated for a couple of days, then transplanted into the surrogate horse-mother. They buy the eggs from U.S.-based slaughterhouses, "which the federal government and animal welfare groups are feverishly trying to shut down."
The original Royal Blue Boon's regular offspring have earned more than two million dollars between them in shows and contests. "I thought it would be an injustice not to allow her this opportunity to be able to go on and perpetuate the blood lines," said Royal Blue Boon's owner, Elaine Hall.
