Canute, Okla. ? The five jet black bulls trotting around Dean Kephart’s red-dirt ranch have the same wide rump, long neck and stubby horns.

In fact, the half-ton, half-grown adolescents are the same in every way — they’re clones.

Red plastic tags punched in their bushy ears are the only method of keeping track of Full Flush 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. All are exact genetic copies of Full Flush, Kephart’s prize-winning celebrity sire of more than 30,000 calves across the country.

The handsome bovine, perfect in most every way, was cloned for one reason: He wasn’t performing up to his stud potential. Full Flush doesn’t produce semen fast enough to satisfy the hundreds of ranchers paying $50 each to artificially inseminate their cows in hopes of producing top-quality, fat and juicy steaks.

At 14 months, Full Flush’s clones are nearly ready to become fathers, and Kephart is ready to start recouping the $25,000 invested in each bull.

But first Kephart and the handful of other U.S. ranchers who’ve cloned cows to sell their semen need permission from the Food and Drug Administration, which has so far not approved them — or any other cloned animals — for human consumption. A decision isn’t expected for months and may not come until next year.

Don Coover, a Kansas bull semen broker, didn’t know Full Flush’s clones would be kept out of the food chain when he proposed to Kephart that they clone the bull. An FDA letter on the issue came out after Coover began the project.

But he has no regrets about putting up thousands of dollars to clone the champion bull, whose semen is one of the hot sellers at Coover’s SEK Genetics/Genetic Horizons in Galesburg.

Kephart needed a bit of coaxing.

“To a lot of producers, this was kind of Star Wars stuff,” Coover said.

Coover punched out a piece of Full Flush’s ear, then shipped the tissue sample to Cyagra, a cloning company in Worcester, Mass. Scientists there isolated the bull’s DNA then injected it into cow eggs that had been stripped of their own genetic material.

The No. 5 clone of Full Flush, Dean Kephart's prize-winning celebrity sire of more than 30,000 calves across the country, is readied for a catalog photo shoot. The catalog photos were taken Tuesday at Kephart's ranch in Canute, Okla.

After seven days, the embryos were implanted in cows at Kansas State University. Three cows gave birth to two clones each. One of the six calves died by hanging its collar on a gate latch. The surviving five seem perfect, said Cyagra marketing director Steven Mower.

“They call them the dream team,” he said.

Kephart admits his clones are spoiled, bottle-fed for the first eight weeks of life and handled like overgrown pets. “They’re pretty good-lookin’,” he says, running a hand over No. 2’s broad back.

Few neighbors in tiny Canute, 100 miles west of Oklahoma City, have come to see the clones — mostly because Kephart doesn’t tell many people about them.

“Most of them would think you’re nuts to do something like that,” he explained.

What the FDA thinks remains to be seen. Officials at the agency promise an explanation before the end of the year of how they’ll determine whether the offspring of cloned animals or their milk is safe to eat.

The offspring of Kephart’s clones and others like them could be tracked and researched before they enter the food chain, said Dr. Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine.

If, as producers expect, milk and meat from cloned animals is no different than food made from other animals, the products likely won’t be specially labeled as such in supermarkets, Sundlof said.