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, and 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.

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)

cloned horses are good at competitive sailing also?!?

And i thought it was about those polo shirts and replicas of the horse logo on the “fake” t-shirts.

Though we are not yet competitive in the Argentinian Polo clone wars, we are making significant progress - https://www.satyress.com/

Me too, I guess I don’t think of “replica” and “clone” as synonymous in the context of animals.

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.

Don't twin studies mostly show this wouldn't be the case?

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.

Nope, that's what relativistic slugs are for

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

That is where many of the nazi war doctors who escaped prosecution ended up…