The Jockey Club Says Nay, but Horse Cloning Could Take Off

After winning the 2003 Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, Funny Cide should be making multimillionaires of his owners in stud fees alone.

After all, the colt Smarty Jones was sold for $39 million shortly after his Derby and Preakness victories last year and now fetches $100,000 for every foal he sires.

Funny Cide, unfortunately, was castrated shortly after birth, so breeding the gelding is impossible.

There is, however, an intriguing -- if still remote -- possibility of extending Funny Cide’s dead-end bloodline: cloning.

“Obviously, it was a mistake that he was gelded in the first place,” said Funny Cide co-owner Jon Constance, an optician in Sacketts Harbor, N.Y. “If there’s a way to rectify that mistake, why wouldn’t we look into it?”

Constance said he and his nine co-owners, most of them high school buddies who paid a combined $75,000 for Funny Cide, have received “very preliminary inquiries” into cloning the champion, whose career earnings top $3 million.

But the Jockey Club, thoroughbred racing’s governing body in North America, keeps an extremely tight rein on breeding practices. Only natural breeding methods are allowed, and its rules prohibit not only cloning but artificial insemination.

“We are trying to ensure the integrity of the breed,” said Bob Curran, spokesman for the Jockey Club, which monitors some 35,000 births a year. The 111-year-old institution is also bent on preserving the sport’s competitive traditions.

The Jockey Club requires that horse breeders submit DNA proof that each foal was bred naturally. Such DNA testing could easily uncover a clone because it would be an exact duplicate of a single horse rather than a mixture from two parents.

Last month, Texas A&M; University announced that it had created the first cloned horse in the United States. The colt, dubbed Paris Texas, is the world’s third successfully cloned horse. Each of those efforts used hundreds of eggs to yield a single foal since the kinds of techniques that researchers developed years ago for other species are still being figured out for horses.

Texas A&M; researcher Katrin Hinrichs and colleagues found success by tricking the cloned embryo to begin growing as if it were fertilized. She said that she has “a couple” of mares pregnant with clones, and that her lab is becoming ever more efficient at the process.

Hinrichs doesn’t expect thoroughbred racing to soon embrace cloning, but believes that the technology could help solve mysterious fertility problems such as the one that plagues the champion thoroughbred Cigar, who won a record $9.9 million during his career. Cigar retired to stud in 1997 and should have fetched $75,000 per foal sired, but instead shot blanks. His owners had the foresight to take out a $25-million insurance policy protecting against infertility, but Cigar’s bloodline is done.

A few biotechnology companies are already soliciting high-end customers to clone beloved polo ponies, Olympic jumpers and other professional horses not barred from competition because of cloning.

“The thoroughbreds will certainly be the last ones,” said Eric Palmer, whose Paris company Cryozootech has had a hand in all three horse clonings, including the birth this year of Pieraz-Cryozootech, a clone of an endurance racer.

“Our business plan does not include them, although I feel that it is worth preserving cells of great champions for the future,” Palmer said in an e-mail interview. “Can anyone say that it is bad to preserve genes that might disappear in the future?”

Palmer said his company has “banked” DNA in freezers from 30 horses.

In San Diego, a small startup called Geneticas Life Sciences said it will begin to sell horse-cloning services next year and expects to charge between $150,000 and $200,000 each.

Genetic Savings & Clone, a Sausalito-based company famous for cloning pet cats, tantalized Funny Cide’s owners briefly with an offer to clone the gelding for $100,000, said Jack Knowlton, a co-owner of the horse. The company declined comment, but Knowlton said Funny Cide’s owners turned down the offer, citing the racing industry’s intransigence on cloning.

“Can you imagine the breeding industry, the blue bloods down there in Kentucky, allowing that to happen?” Knowlton said. “No way.”

Indeed, prestigious Kentucky breeders say there is no room for cloning -- or any other genetic engineering technology -- in their business.

“Part of the intrigue, part of what makes horse racing so appealing, is the challenge and the art of breeding a better animal,” said Dan Rosenberg, president of Three Chimneys Farm in Midway, Ky., which breeds Smarty Jones and other top runners.

“It will become less appealing if it comes down to which owners and breeders can hire the best scientists,” he said. “Do we really want races that pit 10 Secretariats against each other?”