According to claims made by state media on Wednesday, scientists in China’s southwestern city of Wuhan have successfully created a cloned dog described as the “Sherlock Holmes” of police sniffer dogs.
Chinese police officials and scientists say that using such clones will significantly reduce the time and resources required to train detection dogs.
The cloned dog has been named “Kunxun.” It was developed by Beijing-based Sinogene Biotechnology in collaboration with Yunnan Agricultural University, with support from the Ministry of Public Security. The dog’s DNA was taken from a highly trained police sniffer dog.
Speaking to the Chinese newspaper Global Times, Sinogene’s Deputy General Manager Zhao Jianping said he expects such cloned dogs to be produced on a large scale, which would lead to substantial savings in both time and financial investment spent on training detection dogs. However, he also acknowledged that cloning dogs of this kind is very expensive.
According to China Daily, the cloned dog is currently three months old and will undergo intensive training in drug detection, crowd control, and evidence searching. The newspaper reported that by the age of ten months, it will be a fully trained police dog.
Quoting an expert from Yunnan Agricultural University, the newspaper noted that training a police dog usually takes up to five years and can cost as much as 500,000 yuan, with no guarantee that the dog will reach the required standard despite the high investment. The newspaper did not specify the cost of cloning.
China Daily also reported that the world’s first cloned dog was introduced in 2005 by North Korean scientists. Two years after that achievement, North Korea began using cloned dogs trained to detect drugs.