China clones 'Sherlock Holmes' police dog to cut training times
China clones 'Sherlock Holmes' police dog to cut training
times - state media
MARCH 19, 2019 / 7:44 PM
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Scientists in southwest China’s
Yunnan province have cloned what they called the “Sherlock Holmes of police
dogs” in a programme they hope will help cut training times and costs for
police dogs, state media reported on Wednesday.
The dog, named Kunxun, was cloned from a police sniffer
dog by the Beijing-based Sinogene Biotechnology Company and the Yunnan
Agricultural University, with support from the Ministry of Public Security, the
state-owned tabloid Global Times reported.
Sinogene is hoping to make it possible to achieve “volume
production” of cloned police dogs in order to significantly reduce training
times, the company’s deputy general manager Zhao Jianping told the Global
Times, but he added that cloning costs remain a major obstacle.
Kunxun, now three months old, will undergo extensive
training in drug detection, crowd control and searching for evidence, and will
become a fully fledged police dog when it is about 10 months old, the official
China Daily said.
Training usually takes about five years and costs as much
as 500,000 yuan, with no guarantee of success, the paper said, citing an animal
expert at the Yunnan Agricultural University. The paper did not say how much a
cloned dog would cost.
South Korean scientists created the world’s first cloned
dog in 2005, and two years later the country began employing cloned Labrador
retrievers to sniff out drugs for the customs service, China Daily said.
Reporting by David Stanway; Editing by Michael Perry
Comments
Post a Comment