RNL Bio, a Korean stem cell firm, has collaborated with the Animal Hospital of Seoul National University to clone the superior drug sniffing dog through a program named “Animal Genetic Resource Preservation and Clone” sponsored by The Korean Government Agency. One of the clones was named “Toppy”, a name that was derived from a combination of “Tomorrow’
Seven year old “Chase”, the genetic donor of the puppies, has been working as the best sniffing dog for Korea Customs Service. Chase was selected for genetics donor because he has shown best capability as a drug sniffer dog. Three different surrogate moms gave birth to seven puppies last year and they are now six months old. Even though the puppies could not recognize Chase as their genetic father, they all looked alike and acted the same. They all passed the qualification tests and they were accepted to the professional training course of the agency. Eight other non-clone puppies participated in the evaluation at the same time but only one of them advanced to the next step. Cloning a sniffing dog could reduce the costs of training one from scratch by almost 70 percent. Preferred drug sniffer candidates include Labrador Retrievers, Golden Retrievers, English Springer Spaniels, Shepherds and so on. Conventionally, candidates are purchased or bred. According to the records from Korea Customs Service, only 75 dogs have been qualified for sniffer dog capability out of 236 trained since 1990. Cloned dogs have much higher chance to be better sniffer dugs due to superior genetic traits identical to the donor. More than 90% acceptance of cloned dogs is expected and this is comparable to 30% of naturally bred ones. The higher acceptance rate more than compensates the considerable expense during the cloning process. Pending the successful graduation from the training program, the new clones will begin their new jobs from the summer of 2009.
