South Korea Deploys Cloned Drug-Sniffing Dogs 154
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that six puppies cloned from a Canadian-born sniffer dog in late 2007 have reported for duty to check for drugs at Seoul's Incheon International Airport after completing a 16-month training course. The customs agency says clones help to lower crime-fighting costs as it is difficult to find good sniffer dogs. Only about 30% of naturally-born sniffer dogs make the grade, but South Korean scientists say that could rise to 90% using the cloning method. The puppies, each called 'Toppy' for 'Tomorrow's Puppy,' are part of a litter of seven who were cloned from a 'superb' drug-sniffing Canadian Labrador retriever called Chase at a cost of about $239,000. 'They are the world's first cloned sniffer dogs deployed at work,' says customs spokesman Park Jeong-Heon. 'They showed better performances in detecting illegal drugs during the training than other naturally-born sniffer dogs that we have.'"
Re:Standing still (Score:2, Interesting)
So what they have now are the best drug dogs they will ever have, their abilities can't improve any - they will be the same as the dog they were cloned from.
At least until genetics research gets to the point where they can modify the dog's genes and improve them in the lab. This is pretty awesome, It's the first cloning story I've heard that was positive and didn't end with disfigured sheep. (i haven't been following the progress on cloning so i wouldn't know if this is the first success story or not)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Standing still (Score:3, Interesting)
i haven't been following the progress on cloning so i wouldn't know if this is the first success story or not)
a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_%28sheep%29">Dolly the sheep was the first cloned mammal, in 1996. The first success story for canine cloning was Snuppy [wikipedia.org] back in 2005. South Korea (where Snuppy was cloned) have been cloning animals fairly consistently since then. I actually thought they had cloned working dogs long before now.
In other news... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Retirement (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Standing still (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think you can say that immune systems are identical among genetic twins. At birth, if they were carried by the same mother, probably; beyond that there are other variables. Fundamentally similar, but not identical.
In any case, I'm not sure genetic monoculture is that big a threat here. If you have a sizable population of these dogs living together, I suppose it becomes an issue.
Why the focus on drug dogs? You've really raised two questions there. The broader social question of "why the focus on drugs" may be valid, but it's beside the point. That's the legal/political background of the story. Given that background, the more relevant question - why drug dogs instead of, say, service dogs - is a simple matter of cost/benefit. Service dogs aren't cheap, but this cloning project cost $40k per dog, and that doesn't even include the normal costs of training each dog.
For drug dogs, they say that's cheap compared to normal breeding programs once you adjust for the higher success rate. For service dogs, I'm just gonna go out on a limb here and say they need to let others pioneer the process and get the cost down.
Of course, with a relatively large population like service dogs, the concern of a genetic monoculture is greater.
Re:Retirement (Score:4, Interesting)
Hear hear. The same with the disgust some people have about the French eating horse meat. As long as the animal has been well treated in life (including the end of its life not involving unnecessarily stress and pain) I don't see a Korean eating dog or a Frenchman eating horse as any worse than me eating pork.
There are those that try bring intelligence into it, claiming that the intelligence of dogs makes them more objectionable as food than what we generally consider farm animals. This is crap as you'll almost certainly find your average pig to be no less intelligent than some dog breads (pigs are probably more than those yappy little rats fashionable people carry around).
My argument stands or falls on the "being treated well" part, of course, and I'm sure you can find many examples of dogs being mistreated prior to being lunch. But the force feeding of geese to produce foie gras, and other examples of abuse closer to home than the east, means that we can't really claim moral superiority on the issue.
Re:Retirement (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not just about clean/unclean. Many of the "clean" animals must also be slaughtered in a certain way (to drain most of the blood out) otherwise they should not be eaten.
Traditionally mixing meat and dairy products = nonkosher. So that means a pizza with meat+cheese toppings is out...
Seems that was extrapolated that from the verse which says something to the effect that you should not cook a calf in its mother's milk (which to me is a rather different thing from making a pizza or a cheese burger). We're probably swallowing protozoa or even dust mites every now and then, so trying to stretch things to include more cases/scenarios seems a bad idea to me. But what do I know...
Re:Retirement (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with eating dog is that they are carnivorous mammals. It takes a lot of grain to feed a cow, it takes a lot of cow to feed a dog. Not very resource efficient.
I think the metavegetarian diet (only eating vegetables and vegetarians) is more sustainable in the long run.