By Amélie Charles - PhD student in Information Sciences, Université Paris Nanterre – Université Paris Lumières
Since Dolly the sheep in 1996, cloning techniques have been continually advancing. Few individuals can afford a genetic copy of their pet, such as Argentine President Javier Milei, who cloned his favorite dog. However, there is one field where this technique has been widely adopted: the breeding of sport horses, particularly in Argentina and to a lesser extent in Europe.
Among the elite of Argentine polo players, cloning one's best horse is now as common as buying property.
Obtaining a clone costs around €150,000 (approximately $160,000).
Slowly but surely, these cloned horses are making their way into elite equestrian sports breeding programs. It all began in 2003 when Cesare Galli's Italian team "created"
Prometea, the first filly cloned from her own mother. In 2005, the French lab
Cryozootech ushered in the era of cloned stallions for reproduction. These copies of champions have one purpose: breeding. This private research lab created by Eric Palmer gave birth to Pieraz Cryozootech, cloned from the 1994 world champion endurance horse who was castrated. E. T. Cryozootech, born in 2006, became the first clone of a horse that participated in an Olympic Games edition, specifically the 1996 Atlanta Games, where it finished fourth in show jumping.
The International Federation for Equestrian Sports (FEI) had originally banned them in 2007. However, regular births eventually led the governing body to allow clones in all competitions it manages in 2012. Since then, it is theoretically possible to ride a clone in the three equestrian sports of the Olympic Games: dressage, show jumping, and eventing (which includes the previous two disciplines plus cross-country). Another major milestone came in 2013 when a cloned horse won a national-level equestrian competition for the first time.
Will we see a cloned horse win at the Olympics? For the 2024 Paris edition, this seems uncertain if we consult the
pre-selected lists.
Currently, the number of cloned horses remains significantly lower when compared to the tens of thousands of sport horses born from two parents. Additionally, clones of Olympic horses are more often dedicated to reproduction rather than pursuing a sports career. Statistically, the "chances" of one of them clinching the Olympic gold remain very slim.
€100,000 for a filly embryo
Regardless of the results at the next Olympics, these cloning practices are profoundly disrupting horse genealogy! For hundreds of years, horse genealogy has evolved little: a stallion father and a mare mother produce... a colt or filly. Historically transmitted orally, the lists of horse ancestors turned into written registers (known as
stud-books in English), and have been digitized since the 1980s. The digital management modes in horse genealogy are the focus of my PhD research at Université Paris Nanterre, within the DICEN lab (Dispositifs d'Information et de Communication à l'Ère Numérique).
The accuracy of genealogical information about horses is of extraordinary importance to breeders and buyers. This sole information grants exorbitant value to foals that have never seen a racetrack or competition arena. Investments can go up to €100,000 (around $105,000) to acquire an embryo from a champion mare! Yet, the owner is not even certain that the filly will be born...
For comparison, a good racehorse can be bought from €150,000 (approximately $160,000), with
records around the million-euro mark.
This value placed on the pedigree of sport horses leads to inevitable tensions in the equine reproduction market. Through reproductive technologies such as artificial insemination, the most in-demand stallions on this market can have several thousand descendants. The very famous Diamant de Sémilly, French champion and then world show jumping champion in 2002, is the father of more than 4,500 colts and fillies.
What registry for clones?
A clone is an imperfect genetic copy of a single individual, roughly akin to the twin of another horse.
Reproductive cloning aims commercially to make new breeders available on this market. But in reality, it risks reducing the genetic diversity of sport horses. The top-performing horses could be cloned again and again. Imagine if reproductive clones of the stallion Diamant de Semilly (crowned the best stallion in the world in 2016) were created: we would potentially have tens of thousands of foals all descending from the same grandfather, over several generations.
Another question concerns the management of clones in genealogical records. Each follows its own rules, with the vast majority refusing to register clones. In Europe, two accept registering them: the Zangersheide registry managed in Belgium, and the Anglo-European. However, a database system for genealogical records does not typically account for the existence of a clone. For example, the database of the French Institute of Horse and Equitation, Infochevaux, lists the clone as a son or daughter of the cloned horse's two parents.
One way to solve this issue could be using a more flexible database, such as the participative knowledge base Wikidata, which uses graphs. These graphs allow for the creation and management of a lineage specific to clones, with a constraint created just for them. This constraint would specify that a clone comes from only one "parent."
Finally, the technological advances in cloning have obvious ethical implications. What if it became possible to clone a champion from a simple strand of its mane? Should we monitor the best sport horses 24/7, lock them up for life to prevent them from being sampled for cloning? This would be inconceivable for an animal as sensitive and social as a horse. Technological advances in cloning will undoubtedly raise new ethical questions in the years to come.