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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    4 Animal Breeding to see eye to eye with the men he thinks are mistaken. Very early in my career as a consulting geneticist I learned that it is absurd for a geneticist to ask a farmer to accept his own revolu¬ tionary views, when he cannot win the respect of the farmer by being able to tell the good and bad points of a cow or a horse. After all, it is far from difficult to learn what a showman admires in the shoulder of a horse or in the tail of a cow, and if knowing those things will bring about a better understanding between the man of science and the practical man, it is foolish not to avail oneself of this occasion to make those mutually valuable contacts. In some ways a practical breeder has more experience than a geneticist in regard to the particular animals the breeder is interested in. On the whole the main advantage a geneticist has in helping the breeders lies in the fact that his experience in matters pertaining to selection is vastly superior to the experi¬ ence the breeders can have. In the first place, the experience of an old hand in this sort of work is the sum of the experience of the breeders with whom he has co-operated. In the second place, the principles of heredity being identical in all living beings, the geneticist works at a much wider and higher plane than each particular breeder of one sort of livestock. Very often seemingly insoluble problems that confront the breeders of one particular kind of animals are not really problems at all: they have been solved over and over again in very similar instances in other animals, and often in plants. Nobody has ever bred in-breeding-resistant strains of poultry and poultry breeders often discuss the question whether it will ever be possible by continued in-breeding of brothers to sisters to obtain a strain that will be wholly pure and in which no further selection will be necessary or even effective. To geneti¬ cists this problem is not a problem at all. We know from experi¬ ments with other animals and with plants that it will be possible to do this, and we are also able to point out the abundant snags that will present themselves to breeders who want to do this work. When Mr. H. W. Kuhn, the sugar-beet authority, became a member of the Herd-book Society he later presided over for so many years, and gave his opinion on a question of selection in cattle, somebody questioned his experience, as he was only a cattle breeder in a very small way; but he could truthfully say
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