Dec 15th, 2016: Clones

[xoxoxoBruce]

Do these six horses look similar? They should, they're all clones of the same mare.

Last Saturday, at a prestigious match in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo, polo player Adolfo Cambiaso rode six
different horses to help his team win. That in itself is not remarkable: Cambiaso is widely considered the world’s best polo player.
What is noteworthy is that all six horses were clones of the same mare—they’re named Cuartetera 01 through 06—and that
Cambiaso did it at such a high-profile event.

Polo players usually use several horses during a match, but using clones of a favorite pony is new.

Though cloning itself can’t improve a line, it does offer some advantages to the original donor horse, Hinrichs says. “If you start
with a genetic mix that can really do this, then with cloning you know you have the ability to make sure a filly gets the best
environment and care to go forward and you have the potential for the fillies to be better than the originals.” (Polo players
prefer females to males as they have a better temperament and owners also can sell their foals.) She further notes that if you
had foals from the same genetic background and trained them in the same ways, “you wouldn’t have to adjust your riding
technique with each one.” Meeker says his team has “narrowed as much as humanly possible the [difference] between original
and the clone,” even making sure the barn blankets and dogs are the same colors as the ones the original donor knew.

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