Very interesting Barry.
I used to play a horse racing video game called Derby Owner\'s Club. You had to breed, train, and race your own horses, and the data for each horse was stored on a card that you took with you for future racing or breeding. There were national tournaments and it was a lot of fun to create your own unique breeding lines, stable silks, etc...
Then one of the players bought a credit card reader, cracked the programming,and figured out how to manipulate the horse stats on the cards. He created super horses and immediately won his first tournament. Within a year or two, a once thriving game was completely dead. There was no point in investing time and money into your stable when someone could just program a super horse.
I hope racehorse DNA is tougher to manipulate than the hexadecimal code Sega used for that video game.
