Breeding program
Encyclopedia
Breeding programs help animals to breed and can be good for animals as well as the agricultural economy.

A breeding program is the planned breeding
Selective breeding
Selective breeding is the process of breeding plants and animals for particular genetic traits. Typically, strains that are selectively bred are domesticated, and the breeding is sometimes done by a professional breeder. Bred animals are known as breeds, while bred plants are known as varieties,...

 of a group of animal
Animal
Animals are a major group of multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life. Most animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and...

s or plant
Plant
Plants are living organisms belonging to the kingdom Plantae. Precise definitions of the kingdom vary, but as the term is used here, plants include familiar organisms such as trees, flowers, herbs, bushes, grasses, vines, ferns, mosses, and green algae. The group is also called green plants or...

s, usually involving at least several individuals and extending over several generation
Generation
Generation , also known as procreation in biological sciences, is the act of producing offspring....

s. there are a couple of breeding ways like artificial (which is man made) and natural (it occurs on its own which is very rare.)

Natasha and Natalia are Scott's beauty queens! LOL :-)

Breeding programs are commonly employed in several fields where humans wish to completely obliterate the characteristics of their animals' offspring through careful selection of breeding partners:
  • Dog
    Dog
    The domestic dog is a domesticated form of the gray wolf, a member of the Canidae family of the order Carnivora. The term is used for both feral and pet varieties. The dog may have been the first animal to be domesticated, and has been the most widely kept working, hunting, and companion animal in...

     and cat
    Cat
    The cat , also known as the domestic cat or housecat to distinguish it from other felids and felines, is a small, usually furry, domesticated, carnivorous mammal that is valued by humans for its companionship and for its ability to hunt vermin and household pests...

     fanciers
    Animal fancy
    Animal fancy is a hobby involving the appreciation, promotion, or breeding of pet or domestic animals.Fancy may include ownership, showing, trialling and other competitions, breeding and judging. Hobbyists may simply collect specimens of the animal in appropriate enclosures, such as aquaria and...

     may coordinate a breeding program to raise the probability of an animal's litter producing a championship-caliber animal.
  • Horse breeders try to produce fast racehorses through breeding programs.
  • Conservationists use breeding programs to try to help the recovery of endangered species
    Endangered species
    An endangered species is a population of organisms which is at risk of becoming extinct because it is either few in numbers, or threatened by changing environmental or predation parameters...

     by preserving the existing gene pool
    Gene pool
    In population genetics, a gene pool is the complete set of unique alleles in a species or population.- Description :A large gene pool indicates extensive genetic diversity, which is associated with robust populations that can survive bouts of intense selection...

     and preventing inbreeding
    Inbreeding
    Inbreeding is the reproduction from the mating of two genetically related parents. Inbreeding results in increased homozygosity, which can increase the chances of offspring being affected by recessive or deleterious traits. This generally leads to a decreased fitness of a population, which is...

    .
  • There also can be breeding programs for plants. For instance, a winery owner, seeking to find a better tasting wine, could design a breeding program so that only the vines whose grapes make the very best wine are allowed to breed.

See also

  • Animal husbandry
    Animal husbandry
    Animal husbandry is the agricultural practice of breeding and raising livestock.- History :Animal husbandry has been practiced for thousands of years, since the first domestication of animals....

  • Ex-situ conservation
    Ex-situ conservation
    Ex-situ conservation means literally, "off-site conservation". It is the process of protecting an endangered species of plant or animal outside of its natural habitat; for example, by removing part of the population from a threatened habitat and placing it in a new location, which may be a wild...

  • Selective breeding
    Selective breeding
    Selective breeding is the process of breeding plants and animals for particular genetic traits. Typically, strains that are selectively bred are domesticated, and the breeding is sometimes done by a professional breeder. Bred animals are known as breeds, while bred plants are known as varieties,...

  • Captive breeding
    Captive breeding
    Captive breedingis the process of breeding animals in human controlled environments with restricted settings, such as wildlife reserves, zoos and other conservation facilities; sometimes the process is construed to include release of individual organisms to the wild, when there is sufficient...


Breeding programs are generally an organized approach, or methodology to proceed with the preservation of genetic diversity. Breeding programs help scientists understand the mechanisms of resistance and evolution of genes on desired species. The quality of breeding can get affected by the mixing of species with other subspecies changing the main purpose of preserving genes of interest. In animals, advances in reproductive technology such as artificial insemination (AI), embryo transfer (ET), or in-vitro fertilization (IVF) have led to increase selection intensity via reduction in the number of parents needed to mate to produce the next generation of breeding animals. Usually breeding programs are related to economy, these programs allow reducing time in natural breeding by allowing artificial insemination in the detection of estrus cycles. This will provide the owner to obtain more offspring compared to a regular season.
There are several advantages following systematic breeding programs: improvement of the efficiency in heat detection, improvement of the pregnancy rate which will be a reduction in the variation of offspring intervals among animals, possibly reduce involuntary culling for reproductive reasons, and improve the overall reproduction performance of the species.
In plants, breeding with elite parents within closed populations has proven to be a successful strategy to achieve genetic gains and to conserve favorable gene complexes. The major focus of plant breeding programs is to develop cultivars with higher pod yield and grade that have pest and disease resistance. Also in plant breeding programs scientist work to create resistance in plants to extreme condition such as heat, cold, water, and other abiotic conditions, to make the plant available in areas where they were never expected to grow.

Breeding programs help animals to breed and can be good for animals as well as the agricultural economy. They do this to help the animals breed healthy animals and not weak and sickly animals that occur often in their habitat. This is good as it helps endangered animals become a more abundant species so they will not become extinct. This can also be used for plants to get the very best quality plants. Horse owners may use breeding programs to get faster racehorses and dog owners to make their dog healthy and strong. Most proper breeding programs can be done with special diets and embryo transferring. Breeding programs can also help plants to cope in abiotic conditions to be able to grow in other places such as poorer countries which could help reduce famine and poverty. Most breeding programs are carried out by scientists but some can be made doctors and other civilians. These programs can also help the animals evoloution as they are combining subspecies genes to a species to create a new breed of animals.
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