In the modern agricultural industry, the cows used in dairy production have to have their horns removed to prevent the animals from goring each other while in tight living conditions.
Approximately 13.65 million calves have their horns cut or burned off every year (80% of diary calves and 25% of beef cattle).
Now, thanks to genetic editing technology, that practice could come to an end.
In a letter published May 6 in the journal Nature Biotechnology, Scott Fahrenkrug, genetics researcher and the CEO of a Minnesota company called Recombinetics, and his co-authors describe the process by which they edited the genomes of dairy cattle embryos to give them the genetic code that's found in cattle that naturally don't have horns.
They successfully edited and implanted the embryos, which were born and raised to create the two calves in the picture above, named Spotigy and Buri. They have no horn buds, which was verified by vets, and they don't carry the genes for horns, as verified by genetic analysis.
Plus, what's perhaps even more impressive is that there were no "off-target" or unwanted effects — meaning these tweaks to the genome, complex as it is, didn't introduce any unwanted changes.
That's a powerful demonstration of the effectiveness of genetic technology.
"This research example is particularly important because it clearly demonstrates the viability of using gene editing to reduce a costly health/welfare issue in cattle," Max Rothschild, a distinguished professor of agriculture and life sciences at Iowa State University, says in comments provided to the Genetic Expert News Service (GENeS). "This shows that there are serious issues in animal agriculture that can be reduced by gene-editing and that this approach is now well beyond the show and tell stage of micropigs and heavily muscled dogs," other creatures that have been created using genetic editing technology.
Fahrenkrug and company have been working on genetic editing to create hornless or "polled" cattle for years now.
He and others described the dehorning process to us as a brutal one.
One former Nebraska farmer described it to Tech Insider by saying: "It's rough, it's bloody, it's a mess."
"It's abysmal ... the animals are in a lot of pain," said Fahrenkrug. "Everybody I've talked to, they don't like doing it. They feel bad."
The gruesome photo below shows in vivid detail how horrifying this process can be up close.
The stick here is helping keep the string that holds a tourniquet tight, to try and stop the bleeding after this steer was dehorned:
Horn removal, depicted above, is still in use in the United States, but Lucas Sjostrom, Government and Policy Relations Program Manager for the Midwest Dairy Association, says there are less gruesome ways that the horns are removed from most cattle. The recommended approach now, he writes, is to use a local anesthetic and a burner to remove the horn buds before they've grown into horns.
Still, he agrees it's something that most would rather not have to do.
Genetic editing offers a path away from that kind of treatment, and it tweaks these particular genes so they are identical to the genes of other cattle that don't have horns (no new genes need to be "injected" or engineered into the genetic code).
"We're simply copying the letters that are in the Red Angus book of life," Fahrenkrug explained.
He had told us in an earlier interview how precise the process was, introducing fewer mutations than are naturally introduced in the reproductive process. In nature, random new genetic changes — some good, some bad, many irrelevant — show up all the time. That's how hornless cattle appeared in the first place. Now this new technology that allows farmers to make sure cattle have these traits consistently has been further verified with results published in a prestigious journal.
"The most humane way to dehorn a calf is to use genetics," James Reecy, Professor of Animal Science, Iowa State University told GENeS, describing these new results as a "win win situation" for animal welfare and genetic science.
In theory, we could develop hornless dairy cows through breeding, but it would take vastly longer and pose more risks. We'd have to mate cows without horns with each other for generations until we got hornless offspring. Plus, we'd certainly lose some of the traits that make dairy cows the best milk producers in the world.
This technology offers a way around that.
There's still a question of whether or not regulators will allow genetically modified cattle — and other creatures — to be sold. And more research is advisable with any new demonstration of a cutting edge technology. But multiple experts that Tech Insider spoke with said that they absolutely know what changes they're making with genetic editing technology, and that there's no reason to think that the words "genetic editing," changing genes, imply anything unsafe. After all, genes naturally mutate all the time.
"There's this vision of the genome as a static, pristine thing," says Fahrenkrug. "And it's not, frankly, it's much seedier than that and messier than that; the genomes are in motion, that's how we find the traits [that we want in the first place]."
"This is not a transgenic animal, but simply the insertion of a gene that naturally exists in cattle," William Muir, a genetics professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at Purdue University told GENeS. This leads him to conclude that "the lack of off-target effects in the gene-edited cows means regulatory approval should be swift."
This story was updated to include information from the Midwest Dairy Association.
