Category: Animal ethics

China clones police dog – is this the future?

The “Sherlock Holmes of Police Dogs”.

Kunming puppy, cloning puppies, police dogs, China
Kunxun the cloned police dog puppy. Is this really necessary?  Photo Credit: Sinogene.

It is has recently been reported that Chinese scientists, in collaboration with the Ministry of Public Security, have taken DNA from a 7 year old female Kunming Wolfdog named Huahuangma and produced what they hope will be the first of a line of super police dogs that will reduce both the cost and length of training of them. The media have already dubbed it as the “Sherlock Holmes of police dogs”. Huahuangma was awarded first-class meritorious dog of 2016 for her contributions in investigating murder cases. Is it fake news? – unfortunately it appears not.

The puppy was born by caesarian section from a beagle surrogate on the 19th. December, 2018 and is named Kunxun. The company behind this endeavour is Beijing based SINOGENE BIOTECHNOLOGY who hope it will result in “volume production”, but this anticipated “production” is still in its experimental stage and it could be up to 10 years before mass cloning of these dogs is possible. The scientists plan to establish a national police dog cell bank which they can utilise to produce top-notch police dogs.

Chinese Kunming dog, cloning police dogs
Chinese Kunming Wolfdog.

The Kunming dog is believed to have been created from crossing German Shepherds and Wolfdogs in the 1950’s in Yunnan, China to produce military dogs and was recognised as a breed by the Chinese in 1988, since which time they have been used as police, customs, fire and rescue dogs. It resembles a German Shepherd but is usually taller and lighter. Some are kept as pets, but their temperament can be suspect.

Unfortunately China is a leading exponent of cloning animals for research and spurious commercial projects. Five “genetically edited” macaque monkeys were recently bred with identical mental illness in order to test drugs for mental conditions. And this is not the first of this kind of venture for service dogs as South Korea cloned a dog way back in 2005 and in 2007 cloned Labrador Retrievers to be used as Customs sniffer dogs. Scientists believe that this kind of breeding is far better than “regular” or natural breeding.

The only good news is that it may take years to start producing police dogs in large numbers and to make it economically viable, but cloned dogs can retail at over US$56,000. Breeding animals to order to fulfill whatever uses we might want to use them for is a frightening prospect and perhaps we should be trying to stop it before it gets out of control.

Top animal charities spend £500 million a year saving unwanted animals.

Are animal re-homing charities failing animals?

We all know that the thousands of animal “re-homing” charities in the UK and around the world are doing wonderful work in finding new homes for hundreds of thousands of animals each year, because they are quick to tell us so and we see their great work depicted on television documentaries and in the press. As donating public we revel in the glow of sad stories and happy endings of animals finding “forever homes” and for this reason we throw millions at these charities to enable them to continue.

The top eight UK charities spend £500,000,000 each year to support the infrastructure to “save” and “rescue” animals from us humans. In the case of the Dog’s Trust, the UK’s leading dog charity, this works out at £8,100 per dog to care for and re-home the 13,141 dogs (2017 figures).

It would seem on the surface that the animal re-homing charities are doing a really good job and making the most of the money we give to them, but should they judge their success by the number of animals they take in and re-home or by what they are accomplishing in reducing numbers in the first place.

The Humane Societies of the United States (HSUS) is constantly criticised for not giving enough of their funds to animal shelters, but they once succinctly responded by declaring that their aim was to “prevent cruelty and stop animals entering animal shelters in the first place”. It could be argued that the re-homing charities are perpetuating the problem of irresponsible pet ownership by offering a free service to accommodate and re-cycle unwanted pets, strengthening the creed that they are disposable objects.

Each year the number of unwanted and abandoned animals never seems to decrease.

Are animal shelters just re-cycling plants for irresponsible owners.

Each year the major UK animal re-homing charities take in tens of thousands of unwanted dogs, over a hundred thousand cats, thousands of horses and donkeys and hundreds of thousands of rabbits and other small animals. All these figures could probably be doubled, trebled or even quadrupled if you consider the numbers taken in by the hundreds of smaller UK charities.

Local authorities supposedly dealt with 7,000 stray, abandoned and unwanted dogs in 2017 of which over 2,000 were put to sleep although these figures seem far too low. The Cats Protection charity alone cares for nearly 50,000 cats annually.

If official figures are correct, we are supposedly getting on top of the abandoned and stray dog numbers on the streets, but half of the dogs that the Dog’s Trust accept, 6,500 (2017 figures), are strays from local authorities. Any slight decrease is more than matched by the increasing number handed into animal rescue centres by fickle owners so the status quo remains despite continuing campaigns and free neutering. This results in more facilities opening to cope with the continual flood. To make matters worse we are increasingly importing other countries’ stray and unwanted animals. We have had a cat and horse crisis for several years now and an increasing problem of unwanted exotic pets which has resulted in even more charities to rescue them.

While charities are happy to continue picking up the burden there is no incentive for the government or the law to intervene or take notice. The UK Government almost entirely washes it hands of the subject and even relies on animal charities to collate figures on the state of our animal keeping habits such as the RSPCA with their cruelty figures and the PDSA with their PAWS survey otherwise we would have no idea of the problems.

Kittens, rescue, animal rescue,, abandoned, unwanted
The number of stray and unwanted cats in the UK is incalculable.

There must be more to animal welfare than just re-homing dogs and cats.

The charities will argue that they only exist for this purpose, but surely this is a short-sighted outlook and instead of proudly proclaiming the increasing numbers they are finding homes for, they should strive to decrease the numbers becoming unwanted in the first place.  There must be more to animal welfare than just re-homing dogs and cats, but most charities seem happy to just tread water, accept the status quo and never make inroads into solving the major welfare problems. Do we just accept this as a fact of life and money well spent or should we expect more from them? Perhaps it is time for a completely new mind-set.