Seeing Red Over Bid to Clone a Bull

Animal Rights Activists Condemn Spanish Breeder's Attempt to Replicate His Star Stud

MADRID -- Victoriano del R¿o has a favorite animal, a majestic bull named Alcalde, who is nearing the end of his days after faithfully and lucratively siring more than 400 offspring. Loath to see him go, del R¿o is paying a company in Texas about $45,000 to have the big boy cloned.

That may seem like a sweet, sentimental notion to some people, but the idea has kicked up a storm here because Alcalde, meaning "mayor" in Spanish, is a fighting bull, and his sons are sent into the ring to face almost certain death in a 20-minute ritual that aficionados liken to ballet and animal rights activists say is a barbaric slaughter.

Del R¿o, whose family has raised bulls since the early 1800s, says that trying to clone the physical beauty and fighting spirit of 1,000-pound Alcalde, whom he refers to as "the exceptional one," is all about scientific investigation.

"You do this sort of thing once in a lifetime, and if it's crazy, that's okay, but maybe it will open a new path," said del R¿o, 68. "We have been improving bulls for generations with whatever means we had at hand. Bullfighting is more demanding now than 50 years ago. It's more beautiful and artistic, and you have to have bulls that are ready for that."

Opponents of bullfighting counter that there is nothing beautiful about lancing a bull and forcing it to charge around a ring until it is so weak from loss of blood that a matador can deliver the coup de grace with his sword, skillfully or not.

"There are several men with an array of weapons who attack the bull with spears and put it through a series of tortuous stages, in which he is weakened and loses several liters of blood and is left exhausted," said Alyx Dow, who heads the anti-bullfighting program of the World Society for the Protection of Animals in London. Every year, 40,000 bulls in Europe and 250,000 in Latin America die from "this horrendous torture, all for entertainment," she said.

Animal rights advocates and scientists say that cloning is still in its infancy, with a low rate of success that results in an unacceptable number of deformed animals. The process involves taking genetic material from an animal, inserting it into an egg whose nucleus, or genetic material, has been removed, then taking the resulting embryo and implanting it into a host female, which carries it until birth. Scientists say there is little evidence that an animal's fighting spirit can be replicated this way, arguing that such things as behavior are typically dictated by experiences and surroundings.

"The percentage of healthy animals produced by cloning is minuscule," leading to practical and ethical questions about how to deal with the failures, said Michael Appleby, welfare policy adviser to the World Society for the Protection of Animals. Although there is a "genetic component" to aggressiveness, he said, the idea that a cloned bull would act like its original "is a hope rather than a strong prediction. This is not a sensible method that a geneticist or animal breeder would use to produce an animal ideal for their purposes."

Javier Ca¿¿n, a geneticist and veterinarian who specializes in bovine medicine at Madrid's Complutense University, agreed, saying that environmental factors were key in determining how a bull will behave in the ring. In the long run, cloning Alcalde would be "irrelevant" to producing good fighting bulls, he said.

"For me, del R¿o is a lucky man" who had the money to try to clone his bull for sentimental reasons and now is hoping to reap a marketing bonanza by selling the offspring of a future Alcalde II, Ca¿¿n said.

But del R¿o, who owns a 2,200-acre ranch with 450 cows and 500 fighting bulls about 25 miles north of Madrid, insisted that sentimentality and marketing have nothing to do with it. And even though an average fighting bull sells for about $9,000 -- and a superb one can fetch about $27,000 -- the cloning experiment was not a business decision, either, he said.

"I've always been interested in research, and we want to know if the genes for an exceptional animal can be transmitted," he explained during an interview in his Madrid office.