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?
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.
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?
> 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.
You'd expect so and it's bound to have been done, it's still one of those domains where the establishment (owners, trainers, breeders, jockeys, track associations, etc) is weighted against outsiders.
Money would count, but I dare say it'd need a bit of crafty social engineering running in parallel to crack in.
Caveat: I'm not a horse racing / polo insider - I did some contract work years back and rubbed shoulders with a bunch of millionaire horsey types.
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.
At some point moving up the luxury scale the price is less about product and more about buyer psychology.
I can sell a ripped t-shirt, but that same product coming from an upscale exclusive boutique owned by so-and-so’s wife is participation in a whole ecosystem with lots of signalling to other buyers in the same financial strata.
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]
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.
For a brief moment I thought this would be about something like robotic polo ponies, and considered the idea that four-legged high agility, high endurance robots had advanced significantly without me noticing.
A concerning amount of that product page is spent explaining how it has to slow down to pass through doorways, its inability to turn around in hallways, and its weak points you can use to disable one with a knife or gunshot. I feel like I'm reading a tutorial for how to defeat a tricky enemy in a video game.
Perhaps Polo will end up like competitive sailing with one-design classes based on the clone of horse. "Measurement" would be a blood test for drugs and dna.
Ah horse “iron’man” race where the horse had to be swam (or sailed) sailed 25 km would indeed be epic and also great for the resurgence of sailng as practical transport. Probably cruel for the horses though.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
However unlikely it may be, when I see a wealthy celebrity with a doppleganger child the thought crosses my mind that they may have had themselves cloned.
The resemblance between young Donald Trump and his son Barron is uncanny, for example.
> At the slightest touch of the reins, he felt a familiarity that shook him...
Ah... Some good, old, pre-AI journalism slop.
Oh the countless times a universities press release has been turned into four pages describing the smell of coffee some scientist inhales on their way through campus...
Given the way the world is now, I will not be surprised if full human cloning and replica people is a thing at some point in my lifetime, just like horses.
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.
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.
I feel like I am missing a lot.
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)
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.
Money would count, but I dare say it'd need a bit of crafty social engineering running in parallel to crack in.
Caveat: I'm not a horse racing / polo insider - I did some contract work years back and rubbed shoulders with a bunch of millionaire horsey types.
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.
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)
I can sell a ripped t-shirt, but that same product coming from an upscale exclusive boutique owned by so-and-so’s wife is participation in a whole ecosystem with lots of signalling to other buyers in the same financial strata.
Turns out they made a little more than just a few piddly guns...
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.
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)
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
My grandpa said the same thing, first time he saw me.
0 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4819510/
I think replicant would be a fun term though. :)
Humans riding racing robots id watch, but not horse racing.
https://youtu.be/VARJnzhVryc
Imagine 10,000 Albert Einsteins and John von Neumanns working together with modern AI on medical, scientific, and societal issues.
Though there could be an Evil Einstein due to upbringing or something.
(quote by Stephen Jay Gould)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror,_Mirror_(Star_Trek:_The...
I doubt people like Jonas Salk would accept being cloned if they could help it
The resemblance between young Donald Trump and his son Barron is uncanny, for example.
The stories make me wonder if Argentina is a cloning hotspot, though I may be reading too much into two stories.
Ah... Some good, old, pre-AI journalism slop.
Oh the countless times a universities press release has been turned into four pages describing the smell of coffee some scientist inhales on their way through campus...