MikeLigalig.com

South Korean customs has announced that the first cloned sniffer dogs have began active duty checking for drugs at its airports and border crossings. Six of the cloned dogs began duty this week after completing the 16 month training program.

The dogs are all called Toppy, a combination of ‘tomorrow’ and ‘puppy’ and were cloned from a Canadian sniffer dog in 2007. The Korean Customs service says that the clones cut the costs associated with training the sniffer dogs because only 30% of naturally born dogs make the grade, compared to nearly 90% of cloned dogs.

There were originally seven puppies cloned, but one dropped out due to injury. A customs spokesman said: “They are the world’s first cloned sniffer dogs deployed at work”.

Adding that, “They showed better performance in detecting illegal drugs during the training than other naturally born sniffer dogs that we have”.

All six of the cloned dogs have started work at Seoul’s Incheon International Airport.