DUBAI: The future is here, indeed!
A puppy, living with a DNA from an award-winning police sniffer dog, has started training at Kunming Police Dog Base in Yunnan province in southwest China.
South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that the two-month-old female pup named Kunxun, a Kunming wolfdog, is China’s first cloned police dog and was born after scientists took a DNA sample from a seven-year-old female named Huahuangma, which has won a string of awards for helping crack multiple cases in the city of Puer, among them helping find a hotel key that led to the arrest of a murder suspect in 2016.
“She is friendly to humans, sociable and alert,” SCMP quoted the base’s project analyst Wan Jiusheng as saying.
Wan said Kunxun is not scared of the dark or unfamiliar spaces, has a strong sense of smell and can quickly find hidden food.
The project was carried out by Yunnan Agricultural University and Sinogene, a Beijing-based company specialising in cloning pets and animals for commercial uses, SCMP reported, citing Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China.
To produce Kunxun, Huahuangma’s genetic material was extracted and sent to a laboratory in Beijing. An embryo was engineered using an egg from another dog and implanted into a surrogate mother, said the SCMP report.
“The surrogate was a gentle beagle. To prevent complications and improve the survival rate, we carried out a caesarean section,” the Hong Kong-based English language newspaper quoted Sinogene project technician Liu Xiaojuan as telling Science and Technology Daily.
It doesn’t stop there. Wan said it is envisioned to mass clone exceptional dogs in the next 10 years.
“Currently, police dog cloning is still in the experimental stage. We hope in the next 10 years, once the technology becomes more sophisticated, to mass clone exceptional police dogs,” Wan said.
South Korea was the first country to introduce cloned dogs for police or military use in 2007. (Photos: Sinogene)
