Comment by didibus
14 hours ago
The thing is, what if there's an even better horse out there? Once you get on the cloning bandwagon, don't you also lock yourself out of looking/evolving an even better horse?
14 hours ago
The thing is, what if there's an even better horse out there? Once you get on the cloning bandwagon, don't you also lock yourself out of looking/evolving an even better horse?
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.
Well, if there are 100,000 competitors and you want to win, then the 99.99th percentile isn't enough, and yes you would try to reach 99.999.
In the future, all football will be played by Messi clones and all hockey by Gretzkies.
And honestly I’m there for it. Can you imagine the level of play?
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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.
> 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.
It makes sense to me if the buyer is concerned that the performance would revert towards the mean on second generation if you attempt to breed further. But... The new paradigm is not breeding, it's cloning. So it seems like "one shot" high performance steeds even without pedigree could be viable?
I feel like I am missing a lot.
> but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate
sounds like an opportunity. as horse racing has a monetary reward associated with success one imagines a moneyball sort of play that you can compound by betting on your horse which the oddsmakers are going to handicap because it "doesn't have the pedigree" (at least the first few go arounds)
There is a wee bit of money to be made winning a race, sure.
Here's a question though (can vary by country and racing industry), how do the winnings from racing (as a distribution) compare to the earnings from pedigree breeding, stud fees, sperm straw sales, etc.?
I agree there's room for disruption, just as there is from (say) the iron grip of the US Home Owners Associations and other cartels, but expect a lot of regulatory push back from the insiders.
The, ah, American Quarter Horse Association won't let any old nag run if they can help it.
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Pedigree is often a scam.
I know a peer of the realm who made pretty much his entire fortune on forged horses - he was breeding to make fast horses, but the pedigree was a load of, well, horseshit. All started because he’d bought a stallion who shot blanks.
Now it’s all about eight generations deep so he’s safe at this point, as they’re their own pedigree now.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on cows. There's a whole black market genomics industry going on in the uk right now, and probably elsewhere, too.
I can only agree. Hard.
It's less about the horse, the speed, the actual genetics - it's all about the process, the appearance, the gate-keeping.
Country Clubs for horses (and cows, etc)
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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.
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.
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)
You forgot the /s
That is a slam campaign by Milei's political opposition; the company the article mentions (perPETuate) only collects DNA for when cloning becomes feasible. That Time magazine and NY Times repeated the silliness is more a reflection upon modern editorial standards than anything else.
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