Managing Breeds for a Secure Future

Managing Breeds for a Secure Future, by D Phillip Sponenberg and Donald E Bixby, impressed me as probably the best, and most practical, guide for managing small population breeds that I've ever seen.  One of my goals in creating this blog was to discuss this book.  It has so many practical tips, and insights that relate directly to managing land race breeds like Basenjis, and I feel that it deserves to be widely discussed.

I'd like to start at the beginning, and have us work our way through the book.  We have several people signed up as authors for this blog, many with unique insights and experiences.  I hope that as we continue, many of us will comment and write.  I'd encourage anyone interested to buy a copy of the book.  Excerpts are available online through Google Books, but you don't have access to the full text that way.

Chapter 1, Breeds, starts off by defining breed as used throughout the book.  I've heard breeders debate, what is a breed, and how do you define it.  For this book, the chosen definition is "a group of animals whose individual members resemble each other closely enough to be readily recognized, and that reproduce this same breed type when mated together."  This definition can encompass the varying types of breeds (land race, standardized, production type) discussed in more depth in later chapters.

Another important topic is the role of breeds in biodiversity.  Much of the diversity in domestic animals is preserved within breeds.  To me, the money quote was, "(h)alf of the biodiversity of most domesticated species is shared across breeds, while the other half is unshared and is contained only within single breeds.  The consequence of this structure of genetic diversity is that losing breeds means losing biodiversity, because by losing a breed the species loses the genetic information that is unique to that breed." 

The book also sensibly notes that breeds are preserved or lost by people, and that the human influence cannot be ignored, noting that "(b)reeds fail to survive when either the biological or the political influences are ignored or are mismanaged..

Please comment if you have thoughts on the first chapter!  The second chapter covers Biology of Breeds - we can talk about that next week.  An interesting article to accompany Chapter 2 is Sponenberg's discussion of various types of Shetland sheep - at http://www.shetland-sheep.org/pdf/The%20Need%20to%20Conserve%20Different%20Types%20of%20Shetland%20Sheep.pdf