Gregg Veneklasen

Some, perhaps, may envision a cavernous space with giant electrostatic plasma balls with bolts of lightning shooting madly between them and a man with wild, frenetic hair in a white lab coat wearing dark goggles and elbow-length rubber gloves frantically exclaiming, “It’s alive!”

Of course, such is not the case. Instead, the laboratory in which equine reproduction specialist Gregg Veneklasen, D.V.M., does his cloning work is amazingly underwhelming, though the science and his techniques are revolutionary. All cloning activities take place at his Timber Creek Veterinary Hospital in Canyon, Texas, an unassuming little building that sits all alone on the wind-scoured plains of the Llano Estacado region.

Though not frantic, Veneklasen is quite passionate, one who is more than prepared to explain the science and reasons behind cloning, and he is eager to show off his clones. His love for his work is apparent.

He is a robust figure, and with a bushy goatee, dressed in a loudly flowered Hawaiian shirt and work boots, he looks more prepared for hard labor than the delicate work of somatic cell nuclear transfer.

It’s no secret that Veneklasen, 57, has been demonized by a vocal few for his cloning practice, who feel the clones have little value or that he is playing God. Indeed, cloning has proven to be a complex issue, both scientifically and ethically; however, raised as Catholic, Veneklasen has experienced no conflict between his cloning projects and his faith, believing he is working fully within church doctrines. Veneklasen says most of the dispute over cloning arises less on moral grounds than on lack of scientific knowledge.

“I think cloning is looked at as being not very valuable, but I think it’s going to be extremely valuable,” Veneklasen said. “If I had an open book on the clone of Feature Mr Jess [a leading sire of Quarter Horse racehorses], I’d have 150 mares ready to breed to him.

“To say that everybody doesn’t want this isn’t true. There are a few people that don’t want it that are very vocal, that are not knowledgeable. Ten years from now, it’s either accepted or not accepted, and it goes by the wayside. But you let technology be accepted for technology. Scientifically show me why you don’t want them. We’ve had people from Mexico wanting to know if we could do desert bighorn. I’d actually like to clone a woolly mammoth,” Veneklasen said. “I love what I do.”

In fact, Veneklasen’s unique skills are highly sought after by numerous equine enthusiasts. His growing stable of elite horses attests to that. He is also sought after by those in the cutting horse community.

Veneklasen with son Andy and Lynx Melody Too

Lindy Burch, Weatherford, Texas, also owns a Veneklasen-created cutting horse. Burch and Veneklasen got together to clone her own 21-year-old mare Bet Yer Blue Boons (Freckles Playboy x Royal Blue Boon x Boon Bar), aka “Bet,” who earned $350,615 in the cutting pen, all with Lindy Burch at the controls, according to Equi-Stat.

Burch is a National Cutting Horse Association Hall of Fame Rider, having earned $3,331,952 as a cutting horse rider. She also majored in biology and has a master’s degree from UCLA. Though Bet Yer Blue Boons is still producing, Burch cloned her mare because she had some questions she wanted answered.

“Gregg and I both want to know how close they are, just for the sake of knowing,” Burch said. “If these clones are supposed to be exactly like their donors, I want to see if it’s true. I’m in a unique position because I’m the best one to train the new Bet. I trained Bet, so who better to train her clone? Now the environment will not be the same for the clone as it was for Bet, and I’m not the same trainer I was 17 years ago when I trained Bet, but hopefully I’m a better trainer. The goal here is not to breed her; I’m going to train her. I’m keeping a journal and will compare the two.”

The red roan clone Burch got from Bet Yer Blue Boons is now 6 months old, and she calls the mare “Chica Bet.”

“She’s the spitting image of her donor,” Burch said. “She looks like her, acts like her and, so far, has the same personality, though obviously I haven’t ridden her yet. Just like Bet, she’s a little aloof and the boss of the pasture.

“I knew Gregg would give me a good one because he’s simply the best at what he does. He has the technique no one else has.”

A love for wildlife
Born in Colorado, Veneklasen spent his formative years in Santa Fe, N.M. His father, Gordon, was a geologist, and his mother, Margaret, stayed at home. The oldest of five siblings, Gregg Veneklasen is part of a diverse family.

Both of his parents were avid skiers. His father was in the Army and fought in the European theater during World War II. He then became head of the Rocky Mountain Ski Patrol and taught avalanche schools. His mother started the ski program in Santa Fe. Gregg learned to ski when he was 3.

His first brother, Geoff, is a pilot; the second brother, Corky, owns the Michael Werner art gallery in New York City; his sister, Lisa, is head of an African women’s rights organization in Washington D.C.; and the last brother, Garrett, is the foremost authority on peacock bass in the Amazon.

Growing up, Veneklasen developed a love for the outdoors and wildlife, and he knew from the beginning that he wanted to work with animals.

“My true love has always been wildlife,” Veneklasen said. “I worked on several ranches in New Mexico, and I wanted to be a veterinarian since I was a little kid.”

While in high school, Veneklasen tried his hand at cowboying, working on the Fernandez Ranch in San Mateo, N.M.

“It’s one of the largest ranches in New Mexico,” Veneklasen said. “I worked on that for two summers. I decided that if I was going to be a cowboy, I needed to ranch, and I didn’t have any money. It became obvious that wasn’t the good way to go.”

A clone of Feature Mr Jess

Veneklasen began his career by moving to the Texas Panhandle. He first went to the 3 Bar D Ranch in Canadian, Texas, the home of Quarter Horse racehorses Pie In The Sky and Special Effort, operated by Glenn Blodgett at the time. He did so on a bet.

“Everybody in my class said I couldn’t get the job,” Veneklasen said, “so I went for it.”

Veneklasen was hired by Blodgett, who is now with the Four Sixes Ranch in Guthrie, Texas. It was while with Blodgett that Veneklasen began doing nonsurgical embryo transfers before anyone really became involved with the procedure.

“Blodgett was the one who pushed me along and said if you think you can do this [embryo transfer], let’s do it. Now everybody does it. In 1983, we did three embryos out of the mare Queen For Cash for J.E. Jumonville, and that’s what changed the initial rule with AQHA [American Quarter Horse Association]. Back then, you didn’t have to register them, so he put them in race training and registered the best one. That was unfair, so AQHA changed the rule. You talk about full circle, here in the barn right now I have Feature Mr Jess, a Jumonville clone,” Veneklasen said.

According to the AQHA, the first embryo transfer foal was registered in 1981. The AQHA then instituted a rule that allowed only one embryo transfer foal per mare per year to be registered. Then in 2002, the AQHA reached an out-of-court settlement that allowed multiple embryo transfer foals to be registered. Currently, under Rule 227(a) of the AQHA Official Handbook, the AQHA does not allow horses produced by any cloning process to be registered, which was made effective in 2004.

After making several other brief moves, Veneklasen decided that he wanted to go out on his own, so he made the move to Canyon, Texas, because of the dry climate, the friendly people, and the building in which he currently operates just happened to be available.

“It was an empty building that had been a veterinary hospital for 10 or so years, and there was nobody in it,” Veneklasen said. “And the economy was terrible. Everybody said I would fail. That’s the worse thing you can say to me. We did large and small animal. Everything. Because when you’re starving to death, you do everything.”

In 1988, Timber Creek Veterinary Hospital was officially in business.

New discoveries
“Jim Ware was instrumental in the cloning. He brought me the cloning deal,” Veneklasen said.

Prior to Ware’s contact with him about five years ago, Veneklasen had not done any cloning. Ware, Millsap, Texas, is a non-pro cutter who is currently one of three partners of Western Bloodstock, the official sale company for the NCHA. Ware has recommended cloning to several owners in order to preserve bloodlines.

“He just came to see me one day, and that’s how we got together. It was by pure chance,” Veneklasen said.

“I had been given a horse, Lynx Melody, and I had gene-banked her three years previous and didn’t even know they were cloning. Lynx Melody lived at Timber Creek for about 10 years. I got embryos out of her,” Veneklasen said.

Lynx Melody (Doc’s Lynx x Trona x Leon Bars), a 1975 mare, had $176,672 in cutting earnings, with the majority won as the 1978 NCHA Futurity Open Champion with Larry Reeder riding. She is No. 5 on the all-time QHN Top Dams list, with $1,213,719 in offspring earnings.

The Cogdell family of Tulia, Texas, gave Lynx Melody to Veneklasen, who has been a longtime friend, a few weeks before she died in 2004. Veneklasen cloned Lynx Melody and now has Lynx Melody Too, who was foaled in January 2007. She made medical history because it was the first time a horse had been cloned successfully after its death, and at 29, she was the oldest horse to be cloned.

Of course, people had been cloning animals before Veneklasen, but it’s only been in recent years that the techniques have been refined. Cloning is still in its infancy, and he’s only been at it for around five years.

The first mammal to have been successfully cloned from an adult somatic cell was Dolly, a Finn-Dorset ewe. She was cloned at the Roslin Institute in Scotland and lived there from her birth in 1996 until her death in 2003 when she was 6.

The first horse to be cloned successfully was Prometea, a Halflinger mare, in 2003 in Italy by Dr. Cesare Galli. Prometea then gave birth to her first foal in March 2008, a colt named Pegaso.

The first horse to be cloned successfully in North America was Paris Texas, in 2005, and he was produced by American and French researchers led by Dr. Katrin Hinrichs, head of Texas A&M University’s Equine Embryo Laboratory.

In 2003, Russian and Japanese scientists attempted to clone a woolly mammoth. They used remains that were believed to be 200,000-300,000 years old. Yet they were unsuccessful in extracting viable DNA. Also, the well-known San Diego Zoo maintains a “Frozen Zoo,” which stores frozen tissue from the world’s rarest and most endangered species as a “conservation project.”

At the beginning of his cloning career, Veneklasen worked with ViaGen scientists, notably Shawn Walker, in developing some cloning techniques; however, Veneklasen is, in essence, self-taught since so few are experienced with the technical aspects of cloning. With the help of the cloning company ViaGen, Veneklasen produces more clones than anyone in the world.

A clone of Clays Little Peppy

“There were problems. There were problems with the clones,” he said. “There are still problems. There are problems with horses that aren’t clones. Clone producers had some problems with the placenta; there were some problems with contractions, which there are still some, but we haven’t had a placenta problem at all.

“So I had some ideas and they worked. I constantly work on trying to fix the product because the product’s alive. It’s extremely rewarding and a lot of fun.”

Veneklasen uses recipient mares from cutter Jason Abraham of Canadian, Texas. There are about 2,400-2,500 recip mares that belong to Abraham.

“The recip mares are at his place,” Veneklasen said. “And when I need some, I just call and bring some in. During breeding season – March, April, May and June – we’ll keep between 400-500 at the hospital.”

Despite the generally accepted notion that clones are exact replicas of their donors, Veneklasen has made some important discoveries of late. He is in a unique position in that he doesn’t just put the embryos in the recips, he foals them out and keeps them for two months as well, which allows Veneklasen to observe the clones.

One of the most astounding discoveries Veneklasen has made is that he has observed adult DNA making its way into the clones. The implications of this event are not yet fully understood, but one of the possibilities is that stored memory is somehow being passed on.

“Clones are different, no matter what anybody tells you,” Veneklasen said. “They are unique. They are very special. Anybody who’s been around one for any length of time knows that they’re different. We have found that they got some adult DNA in there. Adult DNA has something to do with it; some of that gets transferred in some way.

“We’re going to find out here in the next year or so on these bucking horses on how much adult DNA really does affect this and that. We just see things that are adult-like, that don’t make any sense, stuff not totally run by epigenetics [inherited changes in phenotype (appearance) or gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence].

“People say they only have breeding value, and that’s not true,” Veneklasen continued. “We’re in our infancy in this deal. And there’s lots to prove. The more animals you clone, the more valuable you prove it is.”

Though it costs $150,000 to produce a clone, for Veneklasen, the cloning business has been more to satiate an inquisitive mind than to generate income.

“Cloning has never been monetarily driven, not by me at all,” he said. “This thing doesn’t make my practice that much money. It’s more fun than any of it. It’s all been extremely neat to meet the people, hear the stories.

All the clones have a story. All of them have an owner. That’s the neatest part of the whole deal.”

Veneklasen has cloned a variety of breeds of horses from a number of disciplines – Quarter Horses, Thoroughbreds, Arabians, Paso Finos, cutters, polo ponies, barrel horses, racehorses, bucking broncs, just to name a few.

Recently, Veneklasen cloned Clays Little Peppy (Peppy San Badger x Miss Doc Smoke x Doc’s Smoke), a 1985 mare, who earned $209,366 in the cutting arena, ridden to the 1988 NCHA Futurity Open semifinals by Buster Welch. Clays Little Peppy is also ranked No. 31 among the QHN Lifetime Cutting Top Dams, with offspring earnings of $718,292 through 2009, according to Equi-Stat.

He also has two clones of Reminic (Doc’s Remedy x Fillinic x Arizona Junie), a 1978 stallion. This amazing sire has $4.2 million in offspring earnings across the board in cutting, reining and reined cow horse disciplines.

Feature Mr Jess (Mr Jess Perry x Brenda Feature x Truckle Feature) was a leading sire in Quarter Horse racing whom Veneklasen duplicated. He was a G1 stakes winner with earnings of $539,327, and his offspring have won $13.9 million thus far. Feature Mr Jess was euthanized at 11 years old in February 2009.

For the last five years, Veneklasen has been performing all embryo transfers for ViaGen, a commercial cloning and gene-banking company founded in Austin, Texas, in 2002. The company relocated staff to a new equine laboratory in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, in 2007.

On the horizon
So what does the future hold for Veneklasen and his practice? He remains passionate as always, and he sees only new and exciting possibilities on the horizon.

For 2011, Veneklasen will continue to stand 2008 NCHA Futurity Open Champion Metallic Cat, and he has expressed that he would love to clone the talented red roan stallion by High Brow Cat because he thinks he’s such a special horse.

Even more exciting, Veneklasen has embarked on a new enterprise called Wildlife Reflections, and he is joined by Jason Abraham and Todd Stroud.

Wildlife Reflections is a venture into cloning species other than horses, and the group has moved most aggressively into cloning deer. Texas A&M University cloned a white-tailed deer, a fawn named “Dewey,” in 2003.

“There had been a little deer cloning at A&M, and Jason Abraham said, ‘Let’s see if we can do this.’ The deer deal is even more fun than the horse deal,” Veneklasen said. “With both horses and deer, we have made clones of clones. This proves that the nuclear DNA, no matter how many times you do it, is still the same.”

The Veneklasen group has also been approached recently by a Mexican organization that is interested in cloning desert bighorn sheep. Veneklasen says all three members of the group are integral to make the venture work.

“We have these ideas, and there are three of us, and all of us bring something good to the table,” he said. “I met Jason at Canadian. His granddad was an entrepreneur, and he had a son who was a doctor. Jason is the son of the doctor. Whatever we want to do, he’s the reason we get to do it. He’s very bright. He wants it to work.

“Todd Stroud’s dad is a veterinarian in Weatherford, Texas, a well-known cattle vet. Stroud is good at artificial insemination, embryo transfer and is experienced with deer. He was involved with cloning at A&M.”

This past year, Veneklasen made it as a finalist for the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association Veterinarian of the Year, for which he is proud, but he thinks there may be some biased reasons why he didn’t win.

“I don’t think they’re ready for someone who wears a flowered shirt,” Veneklasen said laughing. “I’ve been wearing them for 30 years,” Veneklasen said. “It makes people smile when they see you. They never know what they’re going to get.”

As a break from his business, Veneklasen enjoys hunting wild pigs and dropping in on the nearby Bar Z Winery for a sip or two of sangiovese, one of his favorite varietals.

Veneklasen is married to Peggy, and they have four children – Jennifer, 30, is an assistant editor of a newspaper; Carolyn, 22, works in Amarillo; Andy, 21, works with his father; and Gregg Jr., 18, is in high school. Veneklasen says that they all love the cloning.

“Every day is an adventure,” Veneklasen said. “It’s one of those things where you never know what you’re going to do. As long as I stay excited about what I do, I want to keep doing it.”