Posted on 01/14/2017 5:10:24 PM PST by Kaslin
In case you thought that everything Vladimir Putin’s boys attempt turns to solid gold these days, we’ve found at least one exception to the rule. This story popped up in one of those “weird news of the week” summaries last year and I didn’t pay too much attention to it. The Telegraph in the UK picked it up, however. The Russians were looking to upgrade their ability to sniff out terrorism (literally) and were receiving a gift of three very special police dogs who were trained to detect drugs and bombs. The reason they were so special is that they were clones.
Russia’s security services are to use cloned sniffer dogs to hunt down drugs and explosives after a donation of experimental puppies from a Korean scientist trying to recreate the woolly mammoth.
Tom, Mark, and Jack were donated by Dr Hwang Woo Suk of the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, a South Korean genetics lab, to a branch of the Russian Military-Historical Society in Yakutia, the remote republic in Russia’s far northeast.
The dogs are the creation of Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, as noted above, and he’s become fairly infamous in science circles. The North Korean cloning pioneer was once hailed as a genius for some of his early successes, but later investigations revealed that there were big problems with his work. Some of his supposed breakthrough discoveries in the field of embryonic stem cell research turned out to be fraudulent, based on fabricated data, and his papers on the subject in the journal Science later had to be retracted. There were also suggestions that he was attempting to engage in banned human cloning research. He was later found to have been guilty of multiple ethics violations and eventually he received a 2-year suspended prison sentence in 2009 for embezzlement and bioethics law violations.
Hey… the guy did manage to clone the first dog however, so I’m sure this will work out just fine. But… not so fast. Now that a couple of months have gone by, it looks like the generous donation didn’t work out so well. In fact, the dogs may be clones, but in terms of practical service they turned out to be duds. (Emphasis added)
Russia has scrapped its cloned dogs of war program after the first batch of ‘superpups’ flunked basic tests because they could not handle the cold, it has emerged.
The designer dogs were cloned in a laboratory to sniff out explosives and drugs and put through their paces by Vladimir Putin’s law enforcement agency in Yakutsk, capital of the Sakha Republic, Russia’s largest region.
But the animals seem incapable of performing basic tasks required by dogs working for the police or security services, and have been rejected for this role, say police chiefs.
I actually found the story originally through the folks at Mysterious Universe and they dug up a few of the more embarrassing details.
The dogs, each valued over $100,000, have reportedly been complete and utter failures. According to the Siberian Times, the dogs are incapable of performing even the most basic police dog tasks. The Siberian Times quotes Aleksey Kolmogorov, deputy head of Russia’s canine service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, who claims the dogs failed because they’re not used to the brutal Siberian climate:
One of them failed to perform any task. Immediately, it lay down because of the cold. The second dog was slightly better, but completed only 50% of tasks. They are not adapted to our harsh conditions, they are smooth coated, cannot withstand frost.
Didn’t anyone think of that before they sent smooth-coated dogs to one of the coldest places on Earth? Sheesh.
Yes, they were short haired, smooth coated dogs without a ton of body fat. And they sent them to Siberia. Shockingly, the breed which didn’t evolve to handle anything remotely that brutal turned out to be incapable of the task. Perhaps we spend a little too much time worrying about the Russians. They may not be quite as clever as we thought.
I was somewhat suspicious of this guy’s name, Dr Hwang Woo Suk, but apparently he’s real:
Aptly describes a lot of pay to play democrats.
The human experiments didn’t go nearly as well.
The North Koreans wanted to clone Kim, their Dear Leader.
But instead ended up with a room full of Kim Kardashians.
Easy fix-send the dogs to Florida!
Odd coincidence...I was watching an episode of Expedition Unknown (Josh Gates) today; it was about woolly mammoths. A segment of the show was visiting this lab in South Korea; even showed some of the dogs and explained the reason for cloning was to get the specialized traits. Have even cloned one of the Sept. 11 search and rescue dogs.
They’re trying to clone a woolly mammoth.
The Soviets tried to domesticate the fox but eventually gave up after creating multiple variants of wild fox.
>>But instead ended up with a room full of Kim Kardashians.<<
That is a LOT of booty!
Cloning a Bel Mal for $100k?
What were they thinking? You can get a Bel Mal or German shepherd that is bred for police work for about $10k.
So that’s where liberals come from! Off the assembly line. It all makes sense now...
No wonder they are so faulty and broken.
Here is a link for current work the Russians are doing, and they have a line of very friendly foxes.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3037451/pet-week/meet-your-new-pet-a-domesticated-fox
There are pics of some amazing colors of foxes on the fur farms.
A couple decades ago I had a fur farming license here in Illinois.
I had red, silver, and white spotted foxes that I raised on a bottle that were tame enough to play with us in the house, with the dogs :)
Do bomb sniffing dogs typically work outside a building or inside?
How should I know?
probably already trained for $10,000. There is still something about cloning that we don’t know. I show cutting horses, and there were four clones of Smart Little Lena that are probably 10 years old now. Two of them sold for under $3000, one died of a form of cancer. I haven’t heard of any horses being shown that are being shown, while offspring of SLL earned $50 million.
I'll wait.
Just out of curiosity, do the hand raised ones lose their rather strong smell?
The smell isn’t caused by something they eat, like garlicky milk from cows and goats.
They have scent glands, like a skunk, but don’t spray like a skunk.
It seemed a lot fainter, and the smell didn’t bother me.
There were some people who took them to exotic animal vets to get the glands removed.
DNA research is getting exponentially faster, and lots of other research on chemicals and such.
I wonder if anyone is working on something to feed foxes that could deactivate it, for people bothered by the smell?
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