Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo

Though we are not yet competitive in the Argentinian Polo clone wars, we are making significant progress - https://www.satyress.com/

And i thought it was about those polo shirts and replicas of the horse logo on the “fake” t-shirts.

Me too, I guess I don’t think of “replica” and “clone” as synonymous in the context of animals.

That'd be alot more ethical than the current horse racing industry if it were the case.

Humans riding racing robots id watch, but not horse racing.

I’m reminded of the old “do you want the boat, or what’s behind the door? It could be anything, even a boat!”

I’m not a polo player but in most games if you’ve already hit the 99.99th percentile, it’s not wise to roll the dice hoping to do better.

Yes, but developing a better horse has a low likelihood of success and a relatively long time horizon. There are some arms race dynamics here in that as long as no one else is trying to develop a better horse, you probably are better off just not trying to either.

So in industrial agriculture, monocultures are a real problem. Every banana is essentially a genetically identical Cavendish. It used to be the Gros Michel until a fungus basically killed it. The same fate awaits the Cavendish. This is true of lots of produce. We, as consumers, like identical produce. But this makes the entire species vulnerable to an enterprising fungus (or virus or bacteria) and it's arguably only a matter of time.

Could this happen if every polo horse basically ends up genetically identical? Probably not in the same way but new diseases do appear. Parvo is only 50 years old.

> what if there's an even better horse out there

Doesn't matter, such things threaten the horse investor lock in economics.

Many years past, an early bit of software from my student days was a side project making an easy to use database system for a horse stud farm, high status stallions being put to mares with the feed, vet visits, results, etc. all logged.

Horse racing is pretty much all about pedigree - without the lineage horses are considered valueless by the industry - super fast back country waler crosses might be acceptable for a four mile charge across open ground onto machine gun nests .. but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate that horse for racing.

I imagine Polo to be much the same, in the rich set. Probably more open and accepting out on the steppes knocking about the heads of the vanquished.

There’s commodities and then R&D. Ignoring every other moral consideration, this horse cloning has turned a biological asset into a (relative)commodity, and if people were looking for better horses they’d stick to the randomized mutation of regular breeding which has that built in as a feature.

This isn’t even the only instance of this technique. You can look at the Argentinian president Milei who hired a company to provide him with consistent advisors in the form of cloned dogs he talks with through a mystic[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_(Javier_Milei%27s_dog)

Looks very much like the only chance of that ever happening now is if someone established a separate league that only allows naturally conceived horses.

They've already moved on to genetic engineering according to the article; no need to fuss with evolving a better horse when you can directly specify one.

At some point breeding programs will mostly be useful for identifying new mutations to splice into the main branch.

The way to determine how you know if you have picked the best horse to clone would be the secretary problem[1] for optimal stopping. This is somewhat plausible among polo horses because of the artificially small population size of pedigreed and trained horses.

The simple version of the problem is you ride about 1/e of the total population and then the first one that is better than all previous ones is your best option. For a pro polo player who would also breed and train others in the off season, over a multi-decade career, it's not perfect, but in aggregate, they are positioned to be pretty good.

Will there be black swan horses? Absolutely. They aren't even black swans, they're inevitable, but if your goal in the sport is to compound your average performance over time without significant setbacks (loss of a prize horse), then cloning a top player's best horse is a good bet.

I find the ethical discussions around horse cloning and sports lack a lot of domain competence in both what riding is, and the stewardship and biology it entails. From a sensory and ontological perspective, a horse is basically an alien being with a peanut sized brain that it falls to our species to be responsible for its existence. Cloning a few to adapt them for survival in our world is profoundly more humane than selling the surplus from breeding programs for meat or leaving them for predators and disease. Even though the philosophers comments about objectification were paraphrased for publication, their perspective is dumb.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

Exploration-exploitation tradeoff strikes again

Was watching a documentary about chicken breeders [0] and they mention that genetics leads to grandchildren being VERY similar to the grandparents.

0 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4819510/

cloned horses are good at competitive sailing also?!?

What about the polo player's genome?

The next actual step according to the article is genetically engineering the horse clones. They've already crispr'd five as proof of concept.

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

(quote by Stephen Jay Gould)

I am not sure if the Einsteins you clone would do what you want. Maybe they will want to be influencers on short video platforms.

Don't twin studies mostly show this wouldn't be the case?

I would watch him carefully if he grew a goatee or something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror,_Mirror_(Star_Trek:_The...

You are such an optimist. We are more likely to get clones of athletes, and clones of billionaires for the organ donation options.

I doubt people like Jonas Salk would accept being cloned if they could help it

However unlikely it may be, when I see a wealthy celebrity with a doppleganger child the thought crosses my mind that they may have had themselves cloned.

The resemblance between young Donald Trump and his son Barron is uncanny, for example.

Nope, that's what relativistic slugs are for

That is where many of the nazi war doctors who escaped prosecution ended up…

It's mentioned in the parent article.

Isn't the flaw with this method that they are using non-reproductive cells? Who knows how many cell divisions those have gone through.

If you can make clones from early embyro cells, you've sidestepped the problem.