Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo
knowablemagazine.org143 points by gscott 15 hours ago
143 points by gscott 15 hours ago
For a brief moment I thought this would be about something like robotic polo ponies, and considered the idea that four-legged high agility, high endurance robots had advanced significantly without me noticing.
Though we are not yet competitive in the Argentinian Polo clone wars, we are making significant progress - https://www.satyress.com/
A concerning amount of that product page is spent explaining how it has to slow down to pass through doorways, its inability to turn around in hallways, and its weak points you can use to disable one with a knife or gunshot. I feel like I'm reading a tutorial for how to defeat a tricky enemy in a video game.
that's a forward thinking robotics company right there. putting in weakspots for when the centaur robot revolution begins. so we have a chance.
Unless those weak spots are quietly addressed by a Field Service Bulletin, just before the revolution kicks off.
This has to be some kind of kink thing. Not judging, just how it looks from first appearances.
yeah, I can't really tell whether that whole thing was serious or satirizing something.
And i thought it was about those polo shirts and replicas of the horse logo on the “fake” t-shirts.
Me too, I guess I don’t think of “replica” and “clone” as synonymous in the context of animals.
Seems like a carefully chosen term, maybe clone being too controversial.
I think replicant would be a fun term though. :)
That'd be alot more ethical than the current horse racing industry if it were the case.
Humans riding racing robots id watch, but not horse racing.
The thing is, what if there's an even better horse out there? Once you get on the cloning bandwagon, don't you also lock yourself out of looking/evolving an even better horse?
I’m reminded of the old “do you want the boat, or what’s behind the door? It could be anything, even a boat!”
I’m not a polo player but in most games if you’ve already hit the 99.99th percentile, it’s not wise to roll the dice hoping to do better.
Well, if there are 100,000 competitors and you want to win, then the 99.99th percentile isn't enough, and yes you would try to reach 99.999.
In the future, all football will be played by Messi clones and all hockey by Gretzkies.
Yes, but developing a better horse has a low likelihood of success and a relatively long time horizon. There are some arms race dynamics here in that as long as no one else is trying to develop a better horse, you probably are better off just not trying to either.
> what if there's an even better horse out there
Doesn't matter, such things threaten the horse investor lock in economics.
Many years past, an early bit of software from my student days was a side project making an easy to use database system for a horse stud farm, high status stallions being put to mares with the feed, vet visits, results, etc. all logged.
Horse racing is pretty much all about pedigree - without the lineage horses are considered valueless by the industry - super fast back country waler crosses might be acceptable for a four mile charge across open ground onto machine gun nests .. but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate that horse for racing.
I imagine Polo to be much the same, in the rich set. Probably more open and accepting out on the steppes knocking about the heads of the vanquished.
It makes sense to me if the buyer is concerned that the performance would revert towards the mean on second generation if you attempt to breed further. But... The new paradigm is not breeding, it's cloning. So it seems like "one shot" high performance steeds even without pedigree could be viable?
I feel like I am missing a lot.
> but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate
sounds like an opportunity. as horse racing has a monetary reward associated with success one imagines a moneyball sort of play that you can compound by betting on your horse which the oddsmakers are going to handicap because it "doesn't have the pedigree" (at least the first few go arounds)
There is a wee bit of money to be made winning a race, sure.
Here's a question though (can vary by country and racing industry), how do the winnings from racing (as a distribution) compare to the earnings from pedigree breeding, stud fees, sperm straw sales, etc.?
I agree there's room for disruption, just as there is from (say) the iron grip of the US Home Owners Associations and other cartels, but expect a lot of regulatory push back from the insiders.
The, ah, American Quarter Horse Association won't let any old nag run if they can help it.
If someone came in and moneyballed the sport with no name horses, wouldn’t their stud fee rise with wins? New lineage would start.
You'd expect so and it's bound to have been done, it's still one of those domains where the establishment (owners, trainers, breeders, jockeys, track associations, etc) is weighted against outsiders.
Money would count, but I dare say it'd need a bit of crafty social engineering running in parallel to crack in.
Caveat: I'm not a horse racing / polo insider - I did some contract work years back and rubbed shoulders with a bunch of millionaire horsey types.
Pedigree is often a scam.
I know a peer of the realm who made pretty much his entire fortune on forged horses - he was breeding to make fast horses, but the pedigree was a load of, well, horseshit. All started because he’d bought a stallion who shot blanks.
Now it’s all about eight generations deep so he’s safe at this point, as they’re their own pedigree now.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on cows. There's a whole black market genomics industry going on in the uk right now, and probably elsewhere, too.
I can only agree. Hard.
It's less about the horse, the speed, the actual genetics - it's all about the process, the appearance, the gate-keeping.
Country Clubs for horses (and cows, etc)
At some point moving up the luxury scale the price is less about product and more about buyer psychology.
I can sell a ripped t-shirt, but that same product coming from an upscale exclusive boutique owned by so-and-so’s wife is participation in a whole ecosystem with lots of signalling to other buyers in the same financial strata.
Yep. Some of my pants have rips and visibly bad stitching because I ripped them and am bad at stitching. Then I see people at the same parties buying brand new ripped pants. At least I fit in, I guess.
Memories of the Glock family and their horses ;)
Turns out they made a little more than just a few piddly guns...
Looks very much like the only chance of that ever happening now is if someone established a separate league that only allows naturally conceived horses.
So in industrial agriculture, monocultures are a real problem. Every banana is essentially a genetically identical Cavendish. It used to be the Gros Michel until a fungus basically killed it. The same fate awaits the Cavendish. This is true of lots of produce. We, as consumers, like identical produce. But this makes the entire species vulnerable to an enterprising fungus (or virus or bacteria) and it's arguably only a matter of time.
Could this happen if every polo horse basically ends up genetically identical? Probably not in the same way but new diseases do appear. Parvo is only 50 years old.
There’s commodities and then R&D. Ignoring every other moral consideration, this horse cloning has turned a biological asset into a (relative)commodity, and if people were looking for better horses they’d stick to the randomized mutation of regular breeding which has that built in as a feature.
This isn’t even the only instance of this technique. You can look at the Argentinian president Milei who hired a company to provide him with consistent advisors in the form of cloned dogs he talks with through a mystic[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_(Javier_Milei%27s_dog)
You forgot the /s
That is a slam campaign by Milei's political opposition; the company the article mentions (perPETuate) only collects DNA for when cloning becomes feasible. That Time magazine and NY Times repeated the silliness is more a reflection upon modern editorial standards than anything else.
The way to determine how you know if you have picked the best horse to clone would be the secretary problem[1] for optimal stopping. This is somewhat plausible among polo horses because of the artificially small population size of pedigreed and trained horses.
The simple version of the problem is you ride about 1/e of the total population and then the first one that is better than all previous ones is your best option. For a pro polo player who would also breed and train others in the off season, over a multi-decade career, it's not perfect, but in aggregate, they are positioned to be pretty good.
Will there be black swan horses? Absolutely. They aren't even black swans, they're inevitable, but if your goal in the sport is to compound your average performance over time without significant setbacks (loss of a prize horse), then cloning a top player's best horse is a good bet.
I find the ethical discussions around horse cloning and sports lack a lot of domain competence in both what riding is, and the stewardship and biology it entails. From a sensory and ontological perspective, a horse is basically an alien being with a peanut sized brain that it falls to our species to be responsible for its existence. Cloning a few to adapt them for survival in our world is profoundly more humane than selling the surplus from breeding programs for meat or leaving them for predators and disease. Even though the philosophers comments about objectification were paraphrased for publication, their perspective is dumb.
>“It was the same,” he recalls. “Same movements, same head.... I couldn’t believe it.”
My grandpa said the same thing, first time he saw me.
Was watching a documentary about chicken breeders [0] and they mention that genetics leads to grandchildren being VERY similar to the grandparents.
This reminds me of a poem in Analog Yearbook 2 (1978) by Jeff Rovin, with the title "The Horse That Jack Built".
Science fiction becomes science fact every day.
Perhaps Polo will end up like competitive sailing with one-design classes based on the clone of horse. "Measurement" would be a blood test for drugs and dna.
cloned horses are good at competitive sailing also?!?
Surprisingly yes!
Ah horse “iron’man” race where the horse had to be swam (or sailed) sailed 25 km would indeed be epic and also great for the resurgence of sailng as practical transport. Probably cruel for the horses though.
This is easy enough to solve if you use a cloned horse that has had some CRISPR genetics done so that it now has fish gills and can breathe as normally underwater as it can on land. You probably drown a few horses before you find one that swims well but, as we all know, once you identify that one horse that can manage that feat you have a monopoly on the game.
Humans can likely be cloned too.
Imagine 10,000 Albert Einsteins and John von Neumanns working together with modern AI on medical, scientific, and societal issues.
Though there could be an Evil Einstein due to upbringing or something.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
(quote by Stephen Jay Gould)
I don't see the point of your comment besides sidestepping a clearly revolutionary mind and an interesting scenario.
The point of my comment is to call attention to the SV tendency of hyper-focusing on the newest shiny toy as a solution to all problems while ignoring the real solutions to the real problems we have right now.
If we assume roughly 1.2k people were as smart as Einstein when he was born then, thanks to birth rates, we could have our "10000 Albert Einsteins" today. Statistically speaking ~3k of them alone were born in either India or China and are probably working a regular, badly-to-okay paid job [1]. We could be recruiting them today.
But no one cares about that because the premise is flawed and it's not about solving "medical, scientific, and societal issues". It's about making money and chasing "interesting scenarios" instead of actual solutions. As the meme format goes, men will literally clone Albert Einstein's brain instead of giving proper funding to schools.
And sure, chasing SF scenarios is fun, but let's not pretend that any of it is about making society better. As the sibling comment points out, we are more likely to get a clone of Rupert Murdoch than one of Stephen Hawking.
[1] For extra irony we can imagine a non-zero number of them work for patent offices.
I think part of the point is that Einstein’s genius was only partially the brain. It was also a unique upbringing in a specific point in time that made it possible. We would have many more geniuses if we game more people the opportunities.
I am not sure if the Einsteins you clone would do what you want. Maybe they will want to be influencers on short video platforms.
I would watch him carefully if he grew a goatee or something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror,_Mirror_(Star_Trek:_The...
You are such an optimist. We are more likely to get clones of athletes, and clones of billionaires for the organ donation options.
I doubt people like Jonas Salk would accept being cloned if they could help it
However unlikely it may be, when I see a wealthy celebrity with a doppleganger child the thought crosses my mind that they may have had themselves cloned.
The resemblance between young Donald Trump and his son Barron is uncanny, for example.
Surprised that the legal drama part of this wasn't discussed, it's how I first heard about this
Another Argentina/cloning-connected story is that President Javier Milei cloned his dog Conan at least four times: https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-04-26/the-myst...
The stories make me wonder if Argentina is a cloning hotspot, though I may be reading too much into two stories.
That is where many of the nazi war doctors who escaped prosecution ended up…
Seems Brazil lost its early lead after cloning Hitler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_from_Brazil_(film)
> At the slightest touch of the reins, he felt a familiarity that shook him...
Ah... Some good, old, pre-AI journalism slop.
Oh the countless times a universities press release has been turned into four pages describing the smell of coffee some scientist inhales on their way through campus...
Given the way the world is now, I will not be surprised if full human cloning and replica people is a thing at some point in my lifetime, just like horses.
[dead]
[dead]