Lawsuit Over Quarter Horse's Clone May Redefine Animal Breeding 172
schwit1 sends this report from the LA Times:
"Lynx Melody Too, a clone of a renowned quarter horse, is at the center of a lawsuit that could change the world of animal breeding and competition. Texas horse breeder Jason Abraham and veterinarian Gregg Veneklasen sued the American Quarter Horse Assn., claiming that Lynx Melody Too should be allowed to register as an official quarter horse. A Texas jury decided in their favor in 2013, but a three-judge panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling in January, saying there was 'insufficient' evidence of wrongdoing by the association.
The suit is among the first to deal with the status of clones in breeding and competition, and its outcome could impact a number of fields, including thoroughbred horse racing and dog breeding. The quarter horse association is adamant that clones and their offspring have no place in its registry. "It's what AQHA was founded on — tracking and preserving the pedigrees of these American quarter horses," said Tom Persechino, executive director of marketing for the association. "When a person buys an American quarter horse, they want to know that my quarter horse has the blood of these horses running through it, not copies of it."
The suit is among the first to deal with the status of clones in breeding and competition, and its outcome could impact a number of fields, including thoroughbred horse racing and dog breeding. The quarter horse association is adamant that clones and their offspring have no place in its registry. "It's what AQHA was founded on — tracking and preserving the pedigrees of these American quarter horses," said Tom Persechino, executive director of marketing for the association. "When a person buys an American quarter horse, they want to know that my quarter horse has the blood of these horses running through it, not copies of it."
Weak, sentimental, nonsense. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless American quarter horses are sinister equine vampires of some kind, I'm fairly sure that no quarter horse has the blood of any other quarter horse, let alone multiple quarter horses, running through it. That's just not this 'heredity' stuff works.
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In this case wouldn't the clone be more valuable, since it actually has the blood of an other quarter horse running through it?
Re:Weak, sentimental, nonsense. (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case wouldn't the clone be more valuable, since it actually has the blood of an other quarter horse running through it?
Obviously, logical thinking is unacceptable when one's income is threatened by it.
Re:Weak, sentimental, nonsense. (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously, logical thinking is unacceptable when one's income is threatened by it.
Well, that is the real issue. Cloning could totally disrupt horse breeding. Why bother with lots of trial and error, when you can just clone a hundred copies of Secretariat? Barriers to entry would be far lower, stud fees would disappear, and horse racing attendance may drop from lack of interest in watching identical horses compete. For thoroughbreds, not only is cloning banned, but they don't even allow artificial insemination or embryo transfer. The whole industry is predicated on artificial scarcity.
Re:Weak, sentimental, nonsense. (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously, logical thinking is unacceptable when one's income is threatened by it.
Well, that is the real issue. Cloning could totally disrupt horse breeding. Why bother with lots of trial and error, when you can just clone a hundred copies of Secretariat? Barriers to entry would be far lower, stud fees would disappear, and horse racing attendance may drop from lack of interest in watching identical horses compete. For thoroughbreds, not only is cloning banned, but they don't even allow artificial insemination or embryo transfer. The whole industry is predicated on artificial scarcity.
But then, you could have an entirely different race, the IROC of horse-racing; where the only difference was (supposedly) the skill of the Jockeys and the horses' "crews"...
Re:Weak, sentimental, nonsense. (Score:5, Funny)
I'm envisioning this going the way of NASCAR and there end up being massive horse pileups to keep the crowd entertained...
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These clones are hardly 'identical' though, are they? Regardless of having the same DNA, they have been brought to term and born from different mothers providing different nutrients at different levels and experiencing different levels of stress and other environmental conditions, all of which can affect the unborn foetus. Dolly the Sheep wasn't exactly the same as her genetic twin, and some of these Secretariat clones will probably run no faster than any other horse.
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I'm not sure that's really true, cloning the best horse at the time doesn't preclude the possibility of a breeder breeding an even better horse for racing and so forth.
Then of course there's disease vulnerability, there's every possibility a disease could wipe out all the clones, whilst allowing many of the bred ones to survive.
Once you've discovered a horse is awesome in a race or whatever, it's already an adult, so sure you can clone it at that point you know it's awesome, but you still have to wait for t
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You might be able to brew an identical champion horse but, will it still be the same horse with a different training regime, rider, food, etc? Changes will occur from the very moment treatment and environment are in any way different from the original animal. Perfect cloning is the stuff of dreams and will stay that way as even differences between individual neurons in the brain will make changes to a given clone. You might even end up with a horse that won't race.
Re:Weak, sentimental, nonsense. (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps some people worship animal pedigrees because it's no longer socially acceptable to do it with humans...
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Rest assured, the people who worship animal pedigrees DO worship human pedigrees as well, no matter how retarded the idea is.
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Not socially acceptable? The Super Rich do it all the time. Go ahead and ask one of the Kennedy's if they are OK with their daughters marrying the servants.
Just because the poor people cant do it, does not mean it's not wildly popular and has been for a very long time. That was the basis behind all the outrage when Charles, Prince of Wales married not only a commoner but an AMERICAN commoner...
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They are loaded with the "blood" of various champion animals through recorded provenance. They just don't want to allow clones into the competition, or for people to claim they are selling the genes of a horse which won, which didn't.
It's a breeding competition, not a cloning competition.
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They are loaded with the "blood" of various champion animals through recorded provenance.
If the horse is a clone, then doesn't it have the provenance of horse whose clone it is?
On the other hand does the birth mare contribute biological material to the fetus, thus meaning that there can be no such thing as a true clone?
On the third hand, I have no I idea if these breeding associations accept In vitro fertilization and surrogacy as a part of their breeding programs? - if they do, that would invalidate my second point.
Standard disclaimer: IANAGNAHB - I am not a geneticist, nor a horse breeder
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On the other hand does the birth mare contribute biological material to the fetus, thus meaning that there can be no such thing as a true clone?
If you are cloning a mare, couldn't the birth mare and the horse being cloned be the same animal? In that case, even the mitochondrial DNA would be identical.
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Cloning introduces hundreds of mutations. Many clones die because of those mutations so it is likely that non fatal mutations would affect performance as well.
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And yes, we are at the point where males are no longer "required" for reproducing. But not to the point where women aren't required. For all larger mammalian species I'm aware of.
Nut the thoroughbred rules don't allow cloning, or "other" artificial methods. Some of this is to stop some early practices like banking lots of sperm, then turn him into a ge
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Actually, NO. Look up the history of Dolly, the sheep. Things aren't that simple.
OTOH, this isn't what they are arguing about.
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That would probably be the fastest way to shut down this idiotic legal threat -- "This is a breeding competition, not a cloning competition. That set of genes in a horse won in the past. Congratulations, good job, breeder! Let's see what the next generation product of these breeders yields.
"We just assumed a base historical background fact, no need to define it further because it's so obvious, of breeding horses as given, and no more foresaw cloning than a Star Trek teleporter creating a duplicate that s
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"We just assumed a base historical background fact, no need to define it further because it's so obvious, of breeding horses as given, and no more foresaw cloning than a Star Trek teleporter creating a duplicate that someone might want to enter."
Spock Must Die!
Oh, wait...
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That wouldn't quite work since it would still allow for breeding the clone of a champion (there goes exclusivity).
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As Oz Peter says, the clone has exactly the same blood running through it as the horse it was cloned from, so if the clone isn't acceptable because of whose blood it has descended from, then the original isn't acceptable either.
The *argument* made in the summary is summarily, irrecoverably, wrong.
If there is another argument that doesn't reside on firmer ground, then it should have been made, but the one made there must be the best one they've got, else they'd've used that instead, and this argument is wron
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Having known some very famous families of horse breeders.. I can say with confidence it is 100% about the money. And most of them probably would clone their children if it meant the little brats would stay in line and not deviate from their parents' norms.
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So found your own quarter horse association and set up the rules you like.
With blackjack? and hookers?
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I thought you wanted it to be different from the original one?
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So the question then becomes, is this an acceptable discrimination, or an unacceptable discrimination. At the moment, I have no opinion either way. I just think that we need to answer that question first.
Re: Weak, sentimental, nonsense. (Score:1)
Actually this is more like the grocery store not allowing cloned beef. If it affects their business, why should they be forced to accept clones? Set up your own damn supermarket, right? Doesn't matter if they are the same thing...
They already have organic and nonbgh milk and all sort of stuff their customers demand but are essentially equivalent... I'll bet people would scream if you took all this stuff away.
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How about: 'Irrational'?
Unless the genetic sciences have reached a point where we're able to build the genetic code one piece at a time for an organism the size of a horse, and considering that this is a 'clone' we're talking about (i.e., a perfect copy of a previous, 'natural-born' horse), then the animal in question is, indeed 'a quarter-hors
Re:Weak, sentimental, nonsense. (Score:5, Informative)
"(i.e., a perfect copy of a previous, 'natural-born' horse)" - it's not that. Not at all. [utah.edu] Even if the horse lives, and seems to have a healthy life, and breeds...its children could have problems. Or maybe the clone will just be fine for 5 years, and suddenly have problems.
Your dna /ages/ in a sense. Unless you're cloning an infant, there are differences...and even then really, since even an infant has lost telomeres, and a variety of other things. If you cloned a blastocyst, it would probably be ok. Anything after that...problems occur, and we don't yet fully know why. More importantly, we don't know how to test for the potential problems, since we don't have a complete picture of what causes them. It is correct to exclude clones, in as much as it can be correct to worry about breed purity in the first place. You do understand that fields such as epigenetics and cloning in general are pretty much in their own infancy right now, right?
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Everything you say is true, and I'm rather certain that it has little to do with the reason for the complaint. (After all, it would just mean that the competition to the standard breeders was weaker. But it *would* allow the increase in the numbers of competitors...perhaps.)
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Clone != exact copy (Score:5, Insightful)
As we saw with Dolly the Sheep, a clone is not an exact copy of an animal. It may contain nearly all the DNA information but first this DNA may be damaged (if nothing else, shortened telomers) and second it may not contain all the exact matrilineal content. This include both midocondral DNA as well as an epigenetic controls the mother's cell line places on its DNA. It is possible someone could have take those into account and made the best possible approximation to those. But it also possible that the crucial developmental characteristics of a quarter horse are in those missing elements.
Thus at a minimum the Quarter horse association could reasonably say that unless the donor cell line is from a quarter horse, it is not a quarter horse. It would also be someone reasonable to say that even with that precaution the shortened telomers mean this is a genetically damaged quarter horse and they want to exclude it from breeding with genetically healthy quarter horses.
of course they are worried (Score:5, Funny)
If they can clone 1/4 horse today, it won't be long until they can clone an entire horse.
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And I can't get 4 quarter horses to run as fast as a whole one, no matter how much duct tape I use.
Their association, their rules (Score:1)
If he doesn't like it, he can set up his own "2/8 Horse" association and certify which horses are officially "2/8 Horses".
Society to Preserve the Sacred Mysteries (Score:3)
"When a person buys an American quarter horse, they want to know that my quarter horse has the blood of these horses running through it, not copies of it."
Well, ick. Blood from horses that lived fifty or a hundred years ago must be getting seriously stinky by now.
In other news, this spokesman appears to be willfully ignorant of the most rudimentary concepts of biology. I guess "understanding" would ruin the nobility and romance of breeding...
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That actually *would* be a reasonable objection, but I have no reason to believe that the spokesman understood this. But do note that clones currently are not likely to be as healthy as the original, and are likely to have various epigenetic markers which will mean that they will not perform in the same way that the original would. Also even in normal reproduction there tend to be copying errors. Clones have a much larger number of these "copying errors" because many error correcting processes are suppre
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Think one half of a side of beef, only horse instead of cow.
Seriously though, it's a breed name - if we were talking Collies or Persian Cats would you still make such inane comments? (Incidentally it got its name for its ability to outpace other breeds in sprints of a quarter-mile or less)
innovation (Score:3)
This is no different than the music and movie industry - an archaic business segment eliminated through innovation that allows better quality for 1/10th the price.
Re:innovation (Score:4, Funny)
Uh, yeah. Maybe someone should enter an F1 car in a horse race and call it 'innovation'. Breeding is part of the competition. Cloning is not 'innovation', it is cheating.
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Cloning replaces breeding, therefore breeding becomes irrelevant. "Cheating" that you mention is 100% opinion. And we did replace those roman chariot races with F1 cars, right?
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Please tell me you are just trolling. Breeding is an integral part of the sport. You can't make it irrelevant and have the same sport, and you have in no way explained how that us better.
Anyway, if you think removing expensive breeding makes the sport better I have the ideal form of horse racing for you. It is so innovative it will make your head spin. It not only removes the archaic and expensive breeding, but also the archaic and expensive feeding, boarding, training, jockeys, and track. Instead, i
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Please tell me you are just trolling. Breeding is an integral part of the sport. You can't make it irrelevant and have the same sport, and you have in no way explained how that us better.
Please tell me you are just trolling. You can't just say breeding is an integral part of the sport, and you have in no way explained why it is or should be, or how it is better. Why can't you make it irrelevant and have the same sport?
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This is no different than the music and movie industry - an archaic business segment eliminated through innovation that allows better quality for 1/10th the price.
Eliminated?
"Cinderella" cost $95 million to produce and grossed $132 million dollars world-wide in its opening weekend.
It is not at all unlikely that Disney could see a billion dollar return on its investment over the life of the film's theatrical run, home video sales, live stage productions, and so on.
"Guardians of the Galaxy" and "Big Hero 6" performed superbly for Disney in their theatrical adaptation ---and have impeccable geek cred, as does "Wreck-It Ralph."
The geek has spent his entire life whini
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Begun the Clone War has. (Score:5, Funny)
Allowing clones would ruin it (Score:2)
Re:Allowing clones would ruin it (Score:4, Insightful)
So we would get to watch games that aren't highly subject to genetic differences, but ones purely based on training and skill? Tempting - where do I sign up?
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So we would get to watch games that aren't highly subject to genetic differences, but ones purely based on training and skill? Tempting - where do I sign up?
Tipoca City, Kamino.
Or Course they will never allow it (Score:5, Interesting)
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Who is they, and what monopoly do they supposedly hold? Horse breeding and racing is a competition, and like all competitions there are rules.
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...
And it won't kill off the whole normal breeding aspect - as cloning won't be getting you improvements, just copies of what you already have. Even the purists that are currently venomous about cloning would have much to gain. Once they naturally-breed a better horse, they'll be able to clone it for their own use - they won't be back to square one when the horse dies or needs to be put down...
Interestingly, no one appears able to breed a better race horse.
The trend line of winning race finish times shows no improvement in 70 years [usatoday.com]!
It appears that conventional breeding long ago reached the maximum potential of this closed gene pool. So cloning is not going to hold the hobby back. Remember, every entry into the Stud Book requires genotyped proof these days that it is the descendant of other horses already in the Stud Book. As one might expect for a hobby created by the idle landed aristocrats in
Good (Score:2, Insightful)
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"Raising horses is a hobby, not an economic venture."
Might want to check up on your information. I know of few to NONE of the breeders out there that just do it because they can. There's a *lot* of money tied up in horse racing. Hence all the hubbub.
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It is an economic venture in exactly the same way as any other gambling entertainment industry is an economic venture.
Horse racing is supported by the people who bet on the race, plus whatever revenue that rich hobbyists (and their quite a few) choose to pump into it.
Sure, for the people raising horses to supply the racing industry with, it is a job or a business, as their position dictates.
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Nonsense, first to cross the finish line is that point.
You're very confused
Current Cloning Problems (Score:4, Insightful)
At the moment, natural-born animals have fewer complications throughout their lives.
Keeping track of pedigrees is arguably more important now that clones are starting to show up.
Horses are expensive; who wants to lay out $10K (or more) without some assurance that your horse will live a heathly life.
See problems with animal cloning:
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu... [utah.edu]
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Animals from a particular pedigree may be "natural-born", but they are oftentimes unnaturally selected, in many cases without regard for the long-term health of the animal or its offspring. They're bred for certain traits that make them desirable, whether that be an ability to run fast, a thick and luxurious coat, or the way that their ears lay, but the end result of artificially selecting them based on those traits can mean that deleterious traits are passed along as well, rather than being culled through
Sounds like horseshit to me. (Score:5, Insightful)
said Tom Persechino, executive director of marketing for the association. "When a person buys an American quarter horse, they want to know that my quarter horse has the blood of these horses running through it, not copies of it."
Does Mr. Persechino not understand what the word "copy" means? Perhaps he's never met twins?
It sounds a lot like the diamond industry where they finally perfected an industrial means of making diamonds at a much lower price than the ones that De Beers charge for their "precious" diamonds. So what does the "precious" diamond industry do? They claim that manufactured diamonds aren't as "precious" as the ones they dig out of the ground. No shit Sherlock! The price is set by the supply, but now the supply is not so small now is it? And as for the diamonds? I don't think they "care" whether they're made in some deep volcanic process or in an industrial plant. They're still... DIAMONDS!
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Does Mr. Persechino not understand what the word "copy" means? Perhaps he's never met twins?
Perhaps he understands that the "copy" you get from cloning is not a perfect copy, but a degraded version of the original. There's good reason to complain if clones are traded as if they were originals.
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While degraded might not be the correct term, modern 'cloning' techniques are not true, 100% perfect copies of the original. As has been pointed out previously, the 'clone' is missing the mitochondrial DNA from the original and some, if not all, of the epigenetic information.
So, cloning, at present is a bit of a misnomer. What happens in the future, is of course, unknown.
Rubys and sapphire (Score:1)
Synthetic ruby and sapphire are even better examples. They are dissed because they are flawless and inexpensive.
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Actually the supply of diamonds haven't been small in a long time - if DeBeers put its stockpiles on the market diamonds would just be shiny gravel. Only the number on the market has been kept artificially suppressed by their global near-monopoly and some (rumored) underhanded business practices - I remember reading an article many years ago about the first fellows growing flawless synthetic diamonds (the kind identifiable as "fakes" only by the fact that they're far too perfect to be natural), and they we
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I don't think they "care" whether they're made in some deep volcanic process or in an industrial plant. They're still... DIAMONDS!
Frankly, I'd go out of my way to NOT buy "real" diamonds but find the manufactured ones, instead. I'll choose the ones not supporting murder, borderline slave labor, and multinational anti-competitive practices and price fixing.
Starbuck II Holstein Cattle (Score:2)
In Canada the hypermale Starbuck clone [wikipedia.org] was create from Starbuck the more prolific semen donor in history, the semen of the clone was illegal in Canada (article in french) [ciaq.com] the funny part hs semens is legal in USA.
By the way the Starbuck name was use as a title of a Canadian film [wikipedia.org] that was remake in the USA under the name of Delivery Man [wikipedia.org] . think of that the next time you put milk in your coffee.
Clarke's Corollary to Hanlon's Razor (Score:4, Insightful)
Any sufficiently profound stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
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A perfect explanation for politics!
Missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the American Quarter Horse Association is woefully ignorant of science and biology here. But none of that matters. The bottom line is the association is a private, non-governmental organization, and provided they are following federal law and state law where they are headquartered, they should have the right to admit or bar any horse they want. If they decide to bar white horses because its Tuesday, that's their privilege.
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"they should have the right to admit or bar any horse they want"
But they also have an obligation to adhere to the rules they already established in the contractual relations with its members and its charter.
The very question at hand is whether AQHA actually has a rule that forbids cloned horses, and thus it becomes a matter of contract law.
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Read what I said, instead of making up what you think I said...I said "here", as in "in regards to cloning". I didn't think I had to spell it out, but I guess for an AC that's par for the course. You'd rather attack people than pay attention. And in addition, YOU still missed the point...what they know or don't know about biology is totally irrelevant in this matter, its THEIR organization, they can admit or refuse who they want, and it should be tossed out of court. And you should go back to your mommy's b
Couple of Points (Score:2)
2. There's an element of "follow the money" here. Breeding in thos
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There is no element of follow the money. The one and only reason to register a horse with A Q&A is to race it. There are many forms of competition that set specific rules on the competitors and this is no different.
torn (Score:2)
Scientifically, I agree the clone should qualify.
But how is this an issue for the courts? Why should there be a legal definition of a certified quarter horse?
I just think if a dorky organization wants to certify horses that exclude clones, they should be able to until such time as it comes becomes bankrupt.
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Scientifically, I agree the clone should qualify.
Sure. Let's look at the issue. First, cloning is not perfect. That's one scientific strike against.
Second, if we're going with scientific reasons for voiding rules of horse racing, why have horse races at all? Surely, it'd be simpler and vastly more efficient use of resources just to randomly assign a winner to any such contest and just get rid of horses and racing altogether.
As I see it, the point of horse racing is as a ritualistic hobby based on the ancient traditions of animal husbandy and breedin
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Such idealistic rubbish. The point of horse racing is to be first across the finish line. There is huge money in winning. People squabble about what manner and condition of animals should be allowed to compete, but that's of less than secondary importance. Once in a while identical racehorse twins were born, and those have sometimes been champions in modern times, so the ancients may have raced clones..
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The point of horse racing is to be first across the finish line.
Nope. That's in error right there.
There is huge money in winning.
Let's take a look [aqha.com]: There are 13 pages of about 100 horses each who has earned more than $500,000. That's decent money, but not the "huge money" that you claim. The peak is almost $2.8 million for a six year old stallion (Ochoa, still alive). Sounds respectable except that his sire, Tres Seis [stallionesearch.com] commands $6,800 in siring fees, despite being 16 years old. He also only raced for three years. So three years of racing and 13 years of siring fees. Think about it.
That's the catch.
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Nope. That's in error right there.
you blather without a reason
Then you prattle on about winnings. Here's a wee little hint for your naive world view, the amount of money bet off-track and off-record exceeds your little winnings numbers by at least a factor of one hundred to one.
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First, cloning is not perfect. That's one scientific strike against.
Neither is breeding. Your point?
The cloned animal is likely inferior to the original animal. While with breeding, you have at least the chance of getting a superior animal.
WTF does this even mean? People can organize races however they see fit. They can race horses v. motorcycles if they like. The issue here has to do with a registry: Is a clone of a thoroughbred also a thoroughbred? I assume that this is about whether the "thoroughbred" class describes a kind of horse, or whether it's just a label that some organization can apply and withhold as they see fit, something like "horses we like". So, the perfect clone of a Caucasian American is automatically a Caucasian, but not automatically an American. So what sort of a designation is "thoroughbred"?
And they did. I already explained that. The registry is also a game and hence, can be run just like any other game. As to explaining the classification of horse breeds, it's not my problem if you don't understand it. There are rules to these things and that's as far as I care. It's like complaining that chess or bridge rules are unscientific merely because you could mak
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As I see it, the point of horse racing is a bored rich club based on the heartless traditions of treating animals like slaves/objects. Combined with a gambling addiction that kills off horses because they are throw away money toys. Cloning just makes that much more obvious.
So what? My argument is still true even in that case. This sort of argument doesn't hold water with me. Should I mess with you and change the rules of whatever you're doing just because I think you're doing something immoral? If there is a problem, there are rational and legal ways to deal with these issues, such as protests, enforcement of animal cruelty laws, etc.
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It's a closed organization ... (Score:2)
... so it's their rules.
We're done here.
Scientists don't understand horse racing.... (Score:2)
Horse racing is all about genetic and breeding differences. The whole industry is predicated on unique horses that provides artificial scarcity. Horse race gambling is entire predicated on the chance that an unknown will be bred with enough genetic difference that allows it to be a better athlete.
While it's true that there isn't a huge difference between genetically created clones and breeding (genetic manipulation either way, breeding is just more random), the fact that cloning can lead to multiple copie
Storm Troopers (Score:2)
They're quite right not to allow some shimmy shammy clone to register on the merits of it's DNA, just look at what happened with the Storm Trooper fiasco. They took one incredible bounty hunter, with mad skills and fantastic aim - and churned out millions of copies that couldn't hit the side of the huge desert crawling robot factory. They also had no appreciable hand to hand skills or the same muscle tone.
The elites will lose, the uber elites will win (Score:2)
But even worse is that if a real uber-champion c
the problem is (Score:1)
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A Pony is a tiny horse, but a Clony is a tiny horse and an abomination. The four horsemen of the apocalypse may yet arrive on four genetically identical steeds.
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I know what they mean, but I also know it is meaningless. There is no real "bloodline" which is broken by cloning; the foal of a clone has the same grandsire and granddam as the original.
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No, insubstantial difference. That is, if the "bloodline" is a shorthand for real physical things, cloning does not break it. If it's some sort of nonphysical woo, sure, cloning could break it, but nonphysical woo isn't real.
If they want to make arbitrary rules for their horse-breeding game, I'm fine with that. But I'm not going to pretend they're anything but arbitrary rules.
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Different AC.
> they'd realize that the blood of a horse is indistinguishable from the blood of its clone
I can't imagine gene expression would be *exactly* the same between the two, unless they lived relatively identical lives. ;)