Gone are the days when you had to go through extensive training sessions filled with “sit” and “stay” with your dog. Scientist in southern China have taken police dog training to another level. Three months ago they cloned a “Sherlock Holmes of police dogs” to cut down on the extensive costs and training a regular police dog requires.
Kunxun the Dog
A now three-month-old puppy, Kunxun is China’s first ever cloned police dog. She was “created” by the Beijing-based Sinogene Biotechnology Company and the Yunnan Agricultural University, cloned from a veteran police dogs skin. Kunxun is 99.9 percent identical to the dog she was cloned from police officials state.
“By cloning veteran dogs, we can greatly improve the success rate and the number of quality Kunming police dogs available, bolstering national security as a result,” Wei Hongjiang, a professor at Yunnan Agricultural University, who partook in the cloning activities, said.
Putting in the Work
Kunxun has just begun working on basic training and police have reported that she shows “good aptitude” when it comes to tests. “It seems like that its genetic potential is better than other Kunming wolfdogs,” [1] (Kunming wolfdogs is what breed she is) Wan Jiusheng, a senior researcher at Kunming Police Dog base stated.
Normally, training a police dog can cost as much as 500,000 yuan, or about $74,000, along with five years of rigorous training [2]. Although scientists have not stated how much a cloned dog would cost, they expect to have Kunxun fully trained for police work by the time she is ten months old.
Notes:
- ^Rt. “China clones ‘Sherlock Holmes of police dogs’ to cut time and cost of K9 training.” RT International, 20 Mar. 2019, www.rt.com/news/454262-china-police-dog-clone. (go back ↩)
- ^“China successfully creates the ‘Sherlock Holmes of police dogs’ through cloning.” ABC News, 20 Mar. 2019, www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-20/china-successfully-clones-the-sherlock-holmes-of-police-dogs/10922288. (go back ↩)
