The Probert Encyclopaedia of Science & Technology

BREEDING

Breeding is the art of improving races or breeds of domestic animals, or modifying them in certain directions, by continuous attention to their pairing, in conjunction with a similar attention to their feeding and general treatment.

Animals (and plants no less) show great susceptibility of modification under systematic cultivation; and there can be no doubt that by such cultivation the sum of desirable qualities in particular races has been greatly increased, and that in two ways. Individual specimens are produced possessing more good qualities than can be found in any one specimen of the original stock; and from the same stock many varieties are taken characterized by different perfections, the germs of all of which may have been in the original stock but could not have been simultaneously developed in a single specimen. But when an effort is made to develop rapidly, or to its extreme limit, any particular quality, it is always made at the expense of some other quality, or of other qualities generally, by which the intrinsic value of the result is necessarily affected. High speed in horses, for example, is only attained at the expense of a sacrifice of strength and power of endurance.

So the celebrated merino sheep are the result of a system of breeding which reduces the general size and vigour of the animal, and diminishes the value of the carcass. Much care and judgment, therefore, are needed in breeding, not only in order to produce a particular effect, but also to produce it with the least sacrifice of other qualities.

Breeding, as a means of improving domestic animals, has been practised more or less systematically wherever any attention has been paid to the care of live stock, and nowhere have more satisfactory results been obtained than in Britain. One of the earliest improvers in Britain was Robert Bakewell, of Dishley, in Leicestershire, who commenced his experiments about 1745, and was very successful, especially with sheep, the celebrated Dishley breed of Leicestershire sheep having since maintained a high reputation. Quantity of meat, smallness of bone, lightness of offal; in cows, yield and quality of milk, in sheep, weight of fleece and fineness of wool, have all been studied with remarkable effects by modern breeders.
Research Breeding