I need info regarding the following topics: Conventional methods of animal improvement-desired characters?

Question

Also i require info on Crossbreeding and inbreeding.
Thanks

Answer 1

I can only speak towards chickens:

The best way is to look for chickens with the traits you want and breed them together. Then take the brothers and sisters created in that union and breed the ones together that have that charectaristic. Then do that process again, leaving out the weird ones. Pretty soon there is no alternative in that particular gene pool but the desired trait. That's how you inbreed them.

Now the gene line is getting kinda tired, and there might be an illness that is really common in your new group of chickens that wasn't serious but appeared in all of the good ones so you weren't able to weed it out, so you breed them with another line of chickens you inbred for the same reason. That brings in some more recessive traits as far as disease susceptibility is concerned, thus matching up more recessive genes with different recessive genes, which causes them not to express, but since you bred that line for the same good traits too, you'll keep them. That's how you stabilize biarre stuff in an inbred population. If you ran 8 lines of chickens for the same trate, you'll be able to arrive at a normal population of chickens with the desired trait.

Sometimes you'll have two breeds of chickens that have two different good traits. Like a Northern Pecker (made the name up) might do really well in the cold, but not have a lot of white meat. The Southern Pecker (same deal) has good white meat, but no down feathers. YOu'll breed them together to mix the traits. SOme of the babies will have a nice mix of the good traits, some will have one good trait and not the other, some will have no good traits. You take the ones with both good traits and start inbreeding them. That's crossbreeding.