The Better Breeding Blog Breed Better Animals

We’ve now covered breeding concepts and basic genetics, and a good amount of that discussion implied improving animals as individuals. But breeding is not about improving an individual animal per se — once it has been born you can’t refine… more »

Describing the genotype of some simply-inherited traits in an individual animal can be straightforward — horned cattle are always ‘pp’, and looking at an Andalusian chicken will tell you if it is ‘BB’ (black), ‘Bb’… more »

Selecting animals for breeding is a process by which those deemed ‘best’ are allowed to be parents, and those deemed not, aren’t. The next generation is similarly assessed, and the next, and the next, with the population expected to… more »

Once animals have been selected for breeding, the next step is to decide which are mated to which via a mating system. Some examples of mating systems, each with different intentions, were briefly covered here. Last week we saw how selecting for a… more »

Inbreeding is the mating of related animals with the effect of increasing homozygosity. Outbreeding (also called crossbreeding) is the opposite of inbreeding, in that unrelated animals are mated with the effect of increasing heterozygosity. Let’s… more »