Animal breeding / by A.L. Hagedoorn.

  • Arend Lourens Hagedoorn
Date:
[1939]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Animal breeding / by A.L. Hagedoorn. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    2 Animal Breeding co-operate with breeders, the breeders profit most, or should do this, if the geneticist knows his and their business. The records kept by breeders, even the herd-book records, are seldom complete enough to permit a genetical analysis. This should never be a matter of reproach, because the records were not meant to be of interest to geneticists. I remember that at one of the international cattle-breeding congresses a committee of three men was nominated to study the way herd-books should be reorganized to make them valuable to genetics. This is really absurd. Herd-books need reorganization, but only to make them valuable to agriculture, and it is the task of geneticists to help to make them so. To a certain extent making the herd-books and their registra¬ tion methods better in regard to animal breeding would also make them more interesting as a source of genetic investiga¬ tions, for the greatest weakness in the ordinary methods of animal registration lies in the circumstance that too many facts of great value are lost. A geneticist, turning to the register of a herd-book for a black breed of cattle would not find data on the inheritance of the one gene differentiating black animals from red ones, simply because the birth of red calves is not registered. From the standpoint of the pedigree breeders this seems good business, as it would hurt sales if it were known that some ani¬ mals are heterozygous and apt to produce red calves. From the standpoint of the same breeders, however, the only way to get rid of the unwanted colour is to weed out the heterozygous animals, or at the very least the heterozygous sires. In the interests of agriculture, it is important that the domes¬ tic animals fit into their place as perfectly as possible. For this reason the separate strains must be made pure-breeding, homo¬ zygous for the most perfect set of inherited factors, and the only way to do this is to gather complete data about the breeding performance of the animals used for reproduction. This means very complete registration and no hiding of defects. It must be recognized that the ordinary herd-books are not established to improve the breed; they register not from the standpoint of the users, but from that of the seller of breeding stock. The farmers who use the animals are not very Hkely to notice this, the pedi¬ gree breeders are prejudiced, and it is the task of the geneticists, who have no personal interest at stake, to point out such things. I have considerable personal experience in co-operation with
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