KEMPTVILLE — Eastern Breeders Inc. (EBI) now has a clone of 10-year-old bull Pursuit September Storm.

The cloned bull will be on display at an EBI open house in Kemptville March 29. The clone is appropriately named Pursuit September Storm II.

Eastern Breeders also has a clone of the famous Canyon-Breeze Allen but the new clone and the original are both alive and housed at the Kemptville location.

"We’re very fortunate to have some of the key bulls in the Canadian industry in Kemptville," says Paul Stewart, the EBI genetics and communication supervisor. But there are problems keeping up with the demand for top bulls.

"We can never get enough semen from the top bulls," he said. Some of the semen from the cloned bulls is being marketed to countries where the use of clones is permissible.

The clones are also used as an insurance plan, he says. All the major bulls in the unit have had tissue samples made so that if an accident or sickness strikes, there’s a clone in the wing to fill semen demand.

Cloning began with the sheep named Dolly in 1997. Since then, American labs have led the way in cloning big show cows but they have never been able to guarantee the clone can produce like her mother. Says veterinarian Dr. R.J. Warren: "I’ve never seen a clone that could come up to her mother." The Port Hope veterinarian owned the first cow to be cloned in Canada, Crescent Mead Margo, a cow who set a world record producing 54,000 pounds as a two-year-old. The company that cloned her was able to produce one bull, which turned in an ordinary performance.

Warren was never able to get the cloned daughter pregnant after that.

He milked the cow for a while but never sold the milk. Today Warren has no dairy herd but keeps the cloned cow around. In the U.S., milk from a cloned cow can’t legally be sold while Dairy Farmers of Ontario won’t accept milk from a cloned cow.

Cloning consists of transferring the DNA in the nucleus of one cell into the spot left by the abstracted nucleus of another. To stimulate cell division, the new combination is treated with chemicals or an electric shock. When the cloned cell becomes an embryo, it is transferred into a host, a procedure that’s become common over the past 20 years.

The cloning of Warren’s Margo cost (US)$40,000 but the price is down to about (US)$25,000 today.