27
votes
The US has a cloned sheep contraband problem
Link information
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- Authors
- Matt Reynolds, Lola Méndez, Vittoria Elliott, Joseph Cox, Lauren Dalban, Ryan Waniata, Matt Kamen, Andrew Couts, Tess Owen, Tim Marchman, David Nield, Lakshmi Chandrasekaran
- Published
- Nov 11 2024
- Word count
- 495 words
They hid the reason the government cares so much in the middle
From the article (citing the only other time this has happened):
So many unanswered questions. Why did he want to clone deer, when they are a nuisance everywhere? What is the volume of $1M worth of deer semen? C'mon people, answer the real questions!
"Some estimates involve seven figures for the 6-year-old monarch buck, whose semen fetches $4,000 to $5,000 per straw" - so a million worth could be as little as 50mL
"A single ejaculate from a white-tailed deer buck can produce between 20 and 70 straws of semen" - so a top prize white-tailed deer buck can produce a million dollars worth of semen in as little as 3 ejaculations. Or in other terms, a single ejaculation can be worth as much as $350k.
I really want to know why semen is measured in "straws" instead of any of the units used for all the other fluids in the world, but I also don't want that question in my search history.
Very likely one straw is what is needed to impregnate one female. A very logical unit if you ask me.
It's not strictly a unit of volume, more a method of extracting, storing and utilizing semen using special plastic straws used in the animal breeding industry. They apparently come in different standard sizes (0.25mL and 0.5mL seem most common - I found some references saying 0.25mL is more popular in deer breeding, while 0.5mL in bovine breeding for example, but I am not an expert)
Huh, I'm curious why there's a market for breeding white-tailed deer. They're not exactly rare, at least not where I'm from...
I believe they are selectively breeding exceptionally large deer with huge multi-point racks, for trophy hunting. They are used to stock hunting ranches where people pay to hunt them, or sometimes just straight up shoot them in a fenced area, without much actual hunting. It's kind of fucked up honestly - look at one example of a list of bucks you can choose sperm from - those are some crazy racks - some look like mutations ?
Some of those look downright impractical and silly. Cool for a fantasy-type headdress, but on an actual animal, not so much. At the very least, the one you linked looks really heavy and like it would cause neck pain. I'm wondering how helpful these would be to survival in the wild, since I feel like it's inevitable for some of the deer born from this to mingle with wild deer.
Deer bucks only grow the antlers for the mating season - they are used to fight other males, and as sexual display for the females - after mating is over, the antlers are dropped. They start growing again in the spring when food gets more abundant, and reach peak size only by the end of summer, so most of the year, they are not large enough to interfere with the bucks normal daily routine. They drop them before winter sets in again.
Those deer in the link are also kept in captivity, so they are fed and protected from predators, so they don't really need to worry about survival. Health issues is a different question, it's possible they might have some as a result of abnormally large antlers.
Thanks for the insight! I know these are captive deer, but again, I was mainly wondering about what would happen if any of their offspring mated with wild deer. Glad to hear it probably wouldn't hurt their quality of life too much.
On that note, I feel like some of these antlers could get very tangled if the bucks tried to fight...
Oh wow, yeah that's really messed up. I grew up around hunters - never really got the appeal myself though - but none of them were really the trophy hunting type. Mostly seemed to be an excuse to get outside (and spend money on gear) and maybe occasionally put some meat in the freezer.
Most of those look like last year’s AI trying to draw hands.
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Probably for the same reason this dude cloned a giant sheep, to hunt them.
Previous discussion back in March when he was caught (4 comments)
Mirror: https://archive.is/JDDqT