This Texas company has been cloning champion horses for six years. Now they're headed to the Olympics, and on the cusp of changing equine sports forever.
Source: viagen.com
In 2009, Tailor Fit had a problem — or, more accurately, his owners did. He had a great lineage, two AQHA championships behind him and, under other circumstances, he would have had a lucrative string of stud fees ahead of him. But like most champion quarter horses, Tailor Fit was a gelding and couldn't breed — so his owners lost out on a wealth of stud fees and anyone who wanted to breed towards a better quarter horse was out of luck. Unless, of course, they were into cloning.
At the time, Blake Russell was three years into his tenure at Viagen, a livestock cloning company. He was also a racing fan, so when Tailor Fit caught his eye, he was able to collect a tissue sample and work up an exact clone. The resulting horse was christened Pure Tailor Fit, an ungelded replica of the original, ready to be replicated whenever the need might arise.
If you'd like your own Tailor Fit clone, they're available.
Source: viagen.com
Russell's livestock cloning company is called Viagen, and in a given year, they clone as many as 50 horses, as well as hundreds of cattle and pigs. $150,000 will buy you a 60-day-old foal, healthy enough to be insurable and guaranteed to have the same good genes as its clone-parent. Cows are cheaper, around $20,000, thanks to more widely available birthing facilities and veternary care.
Viagen uses the same nuclear transfer technique that produced the first cloned animal, Dolly, back in 1997 — although six years of work have allowed for a lot of refinements in practical areas like the development of tissue cultures and treatments for birthing surrogates. With medical cloning mired in ethics concerns, it's one of the few places the technology can develop.
