Conventional breeding techniques

Introduction:

When we talk about the breeding plans in order to improve domestic animals we talk about milk, meat and egg production. When the breeding programs are conducted continuously than the genes get accumulated and this leads to the profitability of these programs. The production traits of animals are firstly preferred but reproductive and health traits are also considered.

The reproductive and health efficacy of animals is also considered important in case of ethical and economical platform. While performing breeding programs the ethical aspects of animals must have to be considered. We perform breeding techniques on animals in order to increase their production rate but also to make them resistant to different diseases.

There are different countries that are improving their techniques in order to improve the performance of calving of animals, making the animals resistant to different diseases, their longitivity and fertility and also to transfer these techniques to the next generation.

In this article we will discuss how to improve the breeding plans for dairy cattle. We will also discuss that how we can make the dairy cattle resistant to different diseases. In this we will also discuss how to record the diseases and how we can evaluate the fertility of female cattle and resistance against different diseases.

Breed:

There is no exact definition of breed. Different definitions of breed exist and we compare these definitions. One of the definition of breed is that “ breed can be defined as the animals that share some common external traits and these external traits are decided by the people. External traits are basically the appearance of animals.

This definition has also a draw back that this definition is relying upon external traits which can be helpful in creating ornamental animals but external traits are not considered in case of those animals in which we want to improve milk and meat production. Those animals that performed better were selected like leghorn hens are considered good for the production of white eggs.

The word “leghorn” is only describing the external traits of animal. The egg market is controlled by very few multinational companies and in this case the term “breed” has very less use. There are two other terms that are used are “hybrid” and “pure breed”. These two terms can cause confusion. The concept of these two terms is different in both cases of animals and plants.

If we talk about plants than the concept of hybrid is basically crossing of the two pure lines. The term pure means those plants that have same genetic makeup. When the two pure lines are crossed than the resulting animals are different as the segregation of the alleles occur.

In case of animals the pure lines do not exist. The pure lines of plants can be created if the plants perform the process of self fertilization or if they cross with their relatives. In case of animals these processes are not possible. In 1940 some attempts were performed to make the pure lines in animals but results were negative as the animals that were produced by this phenomena were infertile.

In case of animals the pure lines are not those animals that have same genetic make up. The animals from different lined are bred so that the phenomena of in breeding can be reduced. By using this phenomena we can increase beneficial genes in our plants.

The hybrid animals are those animals that have genetic variation like we can take the example of rabbits. Different breeds of rabbits are crossed to produce those rabbits that will have genetic variation. Different companies create those animals in which they give importance to functional traits and not to their external traits.

Conservation of breed:

There are some breeds that have better importance in case of food and energy. There are also breeds that perform better in some specific area. We conserve breeds due to some reasons and these reasons are:

·         We want to keep those genes that will be helpful in the next future.

·         In order to protect food we maintain production system of animals.

·         We can also maintain the genetic variation.

·         We can also conserve the breeds in order to protect the cultural heritage.

The conservation of those breeds that are giving us benefits is easy, we face difficulty when we want to conserve those breeds that are not useful.

We conserve these breeds due to the reason that if these breeds are not giving us benefits at the spot they may help us in the next future. Funds are required to conserve these useless breeds. When we talk about the phenomena of breeding it looks simple like two animals having our desired traits are crossed and progeny will have the desirable traits but in actual this phenomena has many draw backs like:

·         The progeny may have undesirable traits.

·         The survival of progeny may become problematic.

·         If these synthetic breeds are introduced in those areas in which farmers are not ready to accept them than these breeds are useless.

·         If a breeding is performing better at present there are chances that it may not perform better in the near future.

The term extinction of species totally differs from the extinction of breed. The extinction of species means that this specie has been totally eradicated from the earth and it cannot be recovered but the term extinction of breed means that this breed has been modified and the breed can be recovered. The maintenance of genetic variation is very important for the survival of species and for producing organisms with beneficial traits.

When rapid change occurs in environment than the animal with genetic variation can survive in changing environment. We can divide the genetic variation between the within breeds and in breeds. When the number of SNPs are measured in chicken than we can detect the differences in genetics. The domestic lion and red jungle fowl are different in terms of their genetic variation.

In order to measure genetic variation there are many methods like measuring the genetic distance between molecular markers and the breeds. There are also problems in this method that cannot be considered while measuring genetic variation. There are some genes that are present in one breed but not present in other breed and these genes may be useful in order to produce animals with desirable traits. 

This can be more likely an insurance argument like if any breed is in danger we can conserve that breed or crossed multiple times to protect it. If any breed is in danger in developed country than its not problematic but if it is in developing countries it can cause problem as these countries has limited resources.