Seeing Red Over Bid to Clone a Bull
Animal Rights Activists Condemn Spanish Breeder's Attempt to Replicate His Star Stud

By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 16, 2008

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.

Del R¿o had gotten the idea of cloning a bull from the pioneering 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep. But when he investigated the possibility back then, del R¿o said, scientists wanted about $1 million to perform the task; now, it's more affordable. If successful, it could produce Alcalde's genetic double in a year.

The bull, with his beautiful physique, long horns, good muscle tone, keen eyesight, speed and rhythm, was ideal for cloning, del R¿o said, although the 16-year-old animal has never fought in the ring and has always been a stud. Del R¿o admitted that what he's really after is replicating Alcalde's courage.

The procedure is being performed by an Austin company called ViaGen. A spokesman for the firm declined to comment on Alcalde or another fighting bull in Mexico that it has contracted to clone. The company's Web site claims it has successfully cloned racehorses, bucking bulls, longhorns, meat and dairy cattle, pigs and other animals.

Miguel Cid Cebri¿n, a former Socialist senator and member of the Spanish parliament's Bullfighting Association, which aims to protect and promote bullfighting as integral to Spain's culture, said he was skeptical about the cloning.

"You can copy the body, but not the soul," Cebri¿n said, noting that everything from the weather to the features of a bullfighting ring to the skill of the matador was vital in eliciting a courageous, spirited performance by a bull. But it was also important to be pragmatic, he said. "Sooner or later, this system had to arise, so it's not very smart to oppose the advance of science."

Cebri¿n, an attorney, said bullfighting was a "cultural and artistic spectacle," not a sport.

"The bull has the opportunity to defend himself and attack and even wound the matador, and the bull dies proving his bravery, but he must die as quickly as possible," Cebri¿n explained. "We all want a fast kill." But in the end, if people don't like bullfighting, they don't have to watch it, he said.

Dow, the bullfighting critic, disputed the notion that it's a fair fight, saying, "Bulls tend to attack -- that's their form of defense -- but they have no chance of making it out alive." Calling bullfighting an essential part of Spanish culture was "propaganda," she said, citing polls showing that more than 70 percent of Spaniards disapprove of it. It is mostly tourists who go to bullfights in Spain, Dow said, "but they only go once, because when they see how cruel and awful it is, they never go again."

But Cebri¿n said that bullfighting remains popular "because it has a lot to do with the Spanish spirit. We Spaniards like adventure and have a reputation for bravery." Still, he has not been able to pass his passion on to his children.

"They can't stand the blood, and if all you see is the blood, you don't see the beauty and excitement and the spectacle," he said. "Blood is the price for that."