HIDE AND SHEEP

How audacious Dolly kidnap bid was foiled

GREEN activists tried to kidnap Dolly the sheep, it’s been revealed. Campaigners broke into the shed where the world’s first clone of an adult mammal was kept at the Roslin Institute in Midlothian. The raiders planned to take Dolly hostage to highlight their opposition to the emerging technology of animal cloning.

But the plot was foiled when they found that the shed was so full of sheep that it was impossible to single Dolly out.

Dolly caused a sensation when she was born in 1996.

The attempt to take her hostage in the autumn of 1998 is revealed in a new book by Mark Lynas, who once led a UK campaign against genetically modified food.

In Seeds of Science: Why We Got It So Wrong on GMOs, Lynas, 44, reveals how he and three co-conspirators gained access to the Roslin Institute and found which of the sheds was Dolly’s home.

Lynas wrote: “As part of a small and secret group, we planned what would have been out most daring action of all.”

Writing about being confronted with dozens of sheep in the shed, Lynas added: “All sheep look more or less the same. Cloned sheep, pretty much by definition, look even more the same.

“The Roslin scientists had outfoxed us by hiding Dolly in plain sight.”

Dolly died, aged six, in 2003.