“DOG BREEDERS COULD EASILY BE THINKING HOW AMAZING IT WOULD BE TO CLONE ONE OF THE GREAT ONES...”
Genetics and that company has created more than 70 cloned polo ponies. Inter- national polo players have been willing to pay over $120,000 to own one. Branching out from polo to thor- oughbred racing, Crestview now has three clones which are genetic rep- licas of Storm Cat, who died in 2013. A descendant of Secretariat, Storm Cat once commanded a stud fee of $500,000. Three foals sired by Storm Cat were purchased by the same buyer for a total cost of $16.2 million. So for some, the cost of a cloned descendant is not necessarily a deterrent. Dog breeders could easily be thinking how amazing it would be to clone one of the great ones... a BIS at a prestigious show, a Platinum Grand Champion, a dog with 100 Best in Shows or an All-Breed Ranking of #1. They might well be thinking that hav- ing that dog in their breeding program would be a dream come true. But hold on, wait just a minute! It might just turn out to be a nightmare. The whole point of cloning a great show dog would be to reproduce, exactly, a dog that looked identical to the donor dog. We cannot assume, how- ever, that would be the case. A kitten named CC (for Copycat) was cloned in 2001. The donor was a calico cat named
Rainbow, but CC was born a black and white tiger tabby. The two cats have the identical genetic material, so how could that be? It has to do with a process called x-inactivation, which happens normally in females to prevent them from having twice as much X-chromo- some activity as males. I have seen published photos of two Aiken Cura cloned foals. They both have white blazes, but while one has a nice symmetrical blaze, the other has one with more of a zig and a zag. While this makes no difference for a polo pony, it would be very important in a conformation dog. In some standards, the wrong facial markings are actually a disqualification. Did that great show dog have a fabu- lous presence in the ring? Would your new prospect have the same experi- ences as a pup, the same training, the same handler—even the same essen- tial personality? If not, chances are the clone might have very different results in competition. And how old would your new show prospect be at birth? Remember, the genetic material from the donor is taken from a mature show dog, per- haps five years old. That material will continue to age so that some genes in your newborn clone could be five
years old at birth! Thus, there is a huge potential for premature aging. Based on the fact that her telomeres were short, there is some basis to believe that some genes in Dolly the sheep had a biologi- cal age of six years when she was born. Finally, but most importantly, we need to consider the suffering of the dogs involved. Currently, a successful cloning happens in a small percentage of attempts. Think of all the pups des- tined to die just before birth or soon thereafter. And there is always the potential for abnormalities and deformi- ties, such as in the case of the cloned calf born with two faces. If, in the future, cloning technol- ogy advances to the point where it becomes affordable and feasible for dog breeders to employ, what are the ethi- cal questions that may arise for dog show competition? Athletic organi- zations ban performance enhancing drugs because it takes the human/nat- ural process out of competition. Will cloned dogs also be banned since sci- entific manipulation is not part of the natural breeding process? The next time lightning strikes, thunder claps and hailstones strike the earth, it may be a message from Terra Mater. Don’t mess with Mother Nature!
“...WHAT ARE THE ETHICAL QUESTIONS THAT MAY ARISE FOR DOG SHOW COMPETITION?”
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