Kunxun is China’s first cloned police dog to enter service.
The dog has finally arrived at a base of the Ministry of Public Security in Kunming, the capital of the southern province of Yunnan, for training, which will last 10 months, before entering service.
The dog who is two months old now has been cloned by a female named Huahuangma, who belongs to the police force of the city of Pu’er.
At the age of seven, Huahuangma was greatly appreciated for her contributions to numerous investigations murders.
Generally, the time needed to train a dog to get him to Huahuangma levels is between 4 and 5 years, at a cost of around 500,000 yuan (about 75,000 USD).
Thus, researchers from Yunnan Agricultural University in collaboration with the Sinogene bioengineering company of Beijing, with the support of the Ministry of Public Security, cloned the dog, thanks to a sample of Huahuangma skin biopsy obtained on the 12th September 2018.
The researchers then used a female beagle, as a surrogate mother. Kunxun was born through surgery.
At birth, the dog weighed 540 g and measured 23 cm, health indicators were normal, according to Liu Xiaojuan, who participated in the trial.
Further studies showed that Kunxun and Huahuangma share the 99.9% of their DNA.
At the station, Kunxun will therefore follow a period of 10 months of training, including search and rescue.
After this first phase, it will be handed over to Li Hua, a veteran police officer and coach of Huahuangma, for further work. Police dogs in China are mainly imported.
The Kunming dog is the only indigenous species bred in China for this kind of activity.
They are often trained as military assistance dogs to perform a variety of tasks such as mine detection. Some are even trained to be fire dogs and rescue dogs.
They are a species derived from the German shepherd and crossed with local breeds since the early 1950s.
Zhao Jianping, deputy general manager of Sinogene, who has cloned more than 20 dogs in the last year, said the company hopes to apply cloning technology in creating police dogs to save money and improve quality.
Source: ecns via Il primo cane della polizia clonato comincia l’addestramento a Kunming, in Cina
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