should i even ????

[dr del]

Hi,

Really? Really?

Does no one really understand how things work? Or does not knowing make it ok? If you inbreed sib to sib it is much worse than line breeding.

Actually yes, I understand a bit about how these things work. I understand the fact siblings may contain far more identical genetic material than a father/ daughter can.

I also know that every animal humans use commercially or domestically has been extensively inbred and linebred. They do not all have problems. In fact they are working hard on mice and rats and have produced extremely hardy and vigorous lines through the responsible and controled use of both linebreeding and inbreeding. The same holds true for cattle and sheep etc.

It increases the chance of expression for the genes in the animal - both good and bad. If you breed out the bad genes as they crop up then the line gets stronger not weaker.

We have not always done this as a species.

Secondly if you inbreed or line breed 2-4 or 20 generations and then sell any of the offspring. Someone who gets one of the babies later on down the line, may in turn do the same thing because "it's cool, ok, and widely acceptable" to do. Now the further down the line you go it now goes from being inbred not just 2-4 or 20 but now its 20-40 or 200 generations.

Some already explained the flaw in your logic here.

If they bought siblings then your scenario becomes more likely - but, again, it merely amplifies what is there - take away the bad as it appears and you will eventually end up with animals without problems. A smaller variation in the genepool to deal with any environmental changes admitedly but I fail to see why that is critical in a pet species.

Once again. Inbreeding is not acceptable (or at least shouldn't be) and shouldn't be practiced. Line breeding should only be done to prove out a trait.

The first part is simply your opinion.

And, as to the second part, if you go back to the begining of the thread and read it again..... that is exactly what he is trying to do.

I am a firm believer that most of the problems we have now with balls are due to this mistake.

This is not altogether correct. All the morphs we have came from the wild and several exhibit problems no matter how outbred they are.

I would be willing to bet we will start to see more deformities in other lines later on. More duckbills, small eyes, bug eyes, no eyes, kinks, etc., etc.
Only time will tell.

Then we should either try and remove the problem by selective breeding or stop breeding them altogether if the problem is serious enough.

It is a tool, nothing more. And one mother nature herself has used remarkably often - she just has a more rigourous testing and culling proceedure.


dr del