Reproductive ability of a cloned male detector dog and behavioral traits of its offspring

Abstract

In 2007, seven detector dogs were produced by somatic cell nuclear transfer using one nuclear donor dog, then trained and certified as excellent detector dogs, similar to their donor. In 2011, we crossed a cloned male and normal female by natural breeding and produced ten offspring. In this study, we investigated the puppies' temperaments, which we later compared with those of the cloned parent male. The results show that the cloned male had normal reproductive abilities and produced healthy offspring. All puppies completed narcotic detector dog training with a success rate for selection of 60%. Although the litter of cloned males was small in this study, a cloned male dog bred by natural mating produced puppies that later successfully completed the training course for drug detection. In conclusion, cloning an elite dog with superior genetic factors and breeding of the cloned dog was found to be a useful method to efficiently procure detector dogs.

Research on reproduction is essential for captive breeding of endangered carnivore species

“…Studies on canine embryos are scarce because of difficulties in collecting in vivo‐produced embryos and the inability to produce canine embryos in vitro (Chastant‐Maillard et al., ). So far, no puppy has been obtained from an in vitro‐produced embryo; however, life births after cloning of somatic cells have been repeatedly reported in domestic dogs (Hossein et al., ; Lee et al., ; Oh et al., ) as well as in coyotes and wolves (Hwang et al., ; Kim et al., ).…”