After cloning monkeys, scientists have now cloned a top-performing police dog with the aim to cut down training time and are hoping to mass produce more.

Chinese scientists have created the country’s first clone of a top-performing police dog, with the goal of producing more such genetically identical dog cops. The puppy, named Kunxun, is a clone of the ‘Sherlock Holmes of police dogs’.

Kunxun was born in an experiment carried out by Sinogene Biotechnology and Yunnan Agriculture University. A genetic copy of a 7-year-old dog named Huahuangma, Kunxun has already started police dog training to see if the original dog’s aptitude for drug detection and crowd control have carried over.

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Huahuangma, according to Chinese state-run paper Global Times, has won awards as a ‘first-class meritorious dog’ for investigating homicide cases. According to tests, Kunxun’s DNA is 99.9% identical to Huahuangma’s. The pup will become a fully-fledged police dog when it is about 10 months old.

Furthermore, training a police dog is also expensive, costing an equivalent of $60,000, and also taking up to five years. If this experiment proves to be a success, the scientists aim to mass produce cloned police dogs, reported Futurism. The scientists hope of help the country’s police forces cut the training time, reduce the training cost and improve breeds of their police dogs.