Technical Breeding Tips and Advice

[Tad Carlucci]

Breeding a PROVABLY pure trait is difficult. The only trait you can do it easily with is the True Recessive (that is, the most recessive trait out there which, since it can't hide anything but itself, because there is nothing to hide, must be "pure".

Moving traits from one line to another is difficult.

Doing both together is quite hard. It takes planning, time, persistence, and a bit of luck.

So, of course, most of what we see when we go out to market looking for high trait counts is usually a mish-mash of fairly dominant traits mixed with a few fairly recessive. What we're seeing it the lucky results.

Not only are we seeing the lucky results .. we're probably also seeing the lower-quality lesser results. The sellers, of course, want to do better. So they're probably keeping the "good" stuff, looking to breed "better" and we're seeing their cast-offs.

Since "luck" (randomness) is the main governing factor for those cast-offs, what we'll see will be the "trend to the middle" .. there won't be much low-count, highly recessive stuff, and there won't be much high-count, highly dominant stuff. But there will be a LOT of middling-count, middling-recessive stuff.

The trick is not to look for FAST. Look for slow, steady improvement. Keep track of things like the "average trait count" for your entire stock. Dump the low count stuff, keep the high trait stuff.