TWC G6 Livestock Production
How were animals produced in the past?
There were 2 main strategies adopted in the past. Natural Selection & Artificial Selection.
Natural Selection
Natural Selection is the process by which favorable hereditable traits become more common in successive generations of a population or reproducing organisms, while unfavorable hereditable traits become more uncommon.
Artificial Selection
Artificial selection consists of both selective breeding and mass selection.
Selective Breeding : is selecting the best individuals in any one generation, and matching them with others who have complementary qualities.
For example, if people want bigger horses to pull their loads, they can put the biggest male and the biggest female horses together and encourage them to breed. This increases the chances that the offspring will also be big. Using another big horse to breed with that offspring will continue the process, until finally, after generations of people continue the process on generations of horses, the entire horse species will be bigger. Using the same process, humans can breed animals to be a certain color, furrier, smaller, gentler or stronger, among other things.
Mass Selection, is where the breeder/farmer has some ideal in mind, and allows all those individuals who roughly conform to the ideal to interbreed freely with each other and throws out the rest. Mass selection works especially well on populations in which the required characters are genetically complex and in which there is significant.
Artificial selection consists of both selective breeding and mass selection.
Selective Breeding : is selecting the best individuals in any one generation, and matching them with others who have complementary qualities.
For example, if people want bigger horses to pull their loads, they can put the biggest male and the biggest female horses together and encourage them to breed. This increases the chances that the offspring will also be big. Using another big horse to breed with that offspring will continue the process, until finally, after generations of people continue the process on generations of horses, the entire horse species will be bigger. Using the same process, humans can breed animals to be a certain color, furrier, smaller, gentler or stronger, among other things.
Mass Selection, is where the breeder/farmer has some ideal in mind, and allows all those individuals who roughly conform to the ideal to interbreed freely with each other and throws out the rest. Mass selection works especially well on populations in which the required characters are genetically complex and in which there is significant.
