Six Horses Cloned From One Mare Help Rider Win Polo Match

Cloning horses is not a thing of the future. I didn't see this article when it came out, over a year ago, but it's quite amazing. 

Six cloned horses help rider win prestigious polo match, an article on ScienceMag.org, written by Jon Cohen and posted on 13 December 2016.

Katrin Hinrichs is a veterinarian at Texas A&M University in College Station, and she cloned a previous horse that Cambiaso rode. The article states, "Hinrichs says breeding a great stallion to a great mare is still the best way to make better horses. 'Cloning is a sideways move,' she says. 'It doesn’t improve the breed.' But polo players don’t necessarily want to breed better horses, she says. 'You’re playing polo to win.'"

There are many issues surrounding clones, and clones in competition especially, but this statement clarifies one of the basic and most important ones. 

I think cloning is of interest to breeders because - while the aim of both is to produce a great horse - the aim of breeding is to create a better breed as well. With breeding, the goal is to produce better and better horses with each generation, and if we are careful about how we define "better," the whole breed will also improve. With cloning - the breed stands still. 

Highly regarded polo competitor Adolfo Cambiaso competed in the Argentine Open using six different clones of a single mare named Cuartetera, and he won the event.