A Texan woman has paid more than $150,000 USD to clone her retired barrel racing horse who won the world title 10 times. Charmayne James now has a foal clone from her champion gelding Scamper.
The first four attempts to produce a clone failed, but success came with the successful birth of a foal on August 8. It was named Clayton, after her childhood hometown in New Mexico. The company that carried out the cloning was ViaGen, based in Austin, Texas. It specializes in animal genetics.
Charmayne met Scamper when she was 11 years old. Though Scamper was considered unrideable, James and her father admired the horse’s conformation, so her father bought him from a cowboy who worked on his feedlot.
Scamper was trained, and in 1984, at age 14, she rode him to win the world championship in barrel racing. The pair went on to win the next nine world championships, making James the all-time leading money earner in barrel racing, the first million-dollar cowgirl, and the holder of more world championships than any other woman in professional sports.
This year, James decided to clone the 29-year-old horse in order to continue to use his exceptional genetics in her breeding program.
“If there was ever a horse to be cloned, Scamper’s the one,” said James. “The baby looks so much like Scamper, conformation-wise. He’s so balanced; he’s got the same shoulder, the same bright eye. I’m happy I had Scamper cloned and I’m so happy with the results.
“We were honoured but not surprised that Charmayne would seek to clone Scamper,” said ViaGen president Mark Walton. “Horse breeders increasingly recognize that cloning is an excellent tool for maximizing the value of their best genetics.”
Cloning produces a later-born identical twin, thereby preserving and multiplying the genetics of superior animals. Many horse breeders, who already use assisted reproductive techniques such as in-vitro fertilization and embryo transfer, view cloning as the next step in breeding.
The technology can be used to produce stallions from the genes of top-performing geldings, or to produce duplicates of popular stallions so that their owners can keep up with demand for semen, embryos, and offspring.
ViaGen also offers a gene banking service, which enables people to preserve the genes of exceptional animals for possible later use in cloning, or as insurance against unexpected injury or loss.
