FOUR BENEFITS OF PEDIGREE RECORDING
If you want your animals to really thrive, a wide and diverse gene pool is necessary. It is also important to make sure that the breeding pair you choose meets the breeding objective you desire. Without access to an animals genomes, pedigree recording is the only way to do this.
You could record on a spreadsheet or a notebook, OR you could record on CloudLines.
To avoid inbreeding, and to maintain a diverse gene pool, accurate and reliable records are required. When it comes to smaller breed gene pools, some math is also essential. This is where CloudLines can help.
Achieving Your Breeding Objective
Before you breed your animals, you need to know- what offspring are wanting from the mating? Is it a certain wool-type? Or relations to a title-winning animal due to its trial winning ability? What about a certain coat colour and pattern?
Having access to multiple generations of information helps you decide if the traits you’ve selected are dominant in the animals pedigree. The more pedigree certificates you can look at and choose from, the more chance you have of meeting your breeding objective.
Without knowing the pedigree history of your animals, the outcome would be random and can often cause undesirable results.
Maintaining A Diverse Gene Pool
Responsible breeding objectives span more than one generation. To maintain a wide and diverse gene pool, selecting breeding pairs based on both Coefficient of Inbreeding (COI) and Mean-Kinship (MK) gives you a long-term sustainable breeding option.
COI is a calculation of how inbred a certain animal is, based on how many common ancestors it shares. This is always a number between 0 and 1 and, in general, the lower the number, the better.
MK is a measure of how related an animal is to the rest of the breed population (assuming you have full pedigrees). This is also a number between 0 and 1, but this time the numbers are more like reference-points, than pure higher or lower figures.
With a Cloud-Lines account, you have access to thee selector tool which utilises both MK and COI (with pre-defined MK thresholds) to find stud matches for a particular female.
Increase The Value of Your Animal
An in-depth pedigree certificate will allow you to show off your breeding selection choices and the results of your hard work. Having evidence of this will allow you to charge the appropriate amount for your animals offspring.
Having the evidence of your animals breeding shows what their potential is in relation to their pedigree, something especially essential if you have a specific breeding objective.
When dealing with Rare Breed animals, keeping a wide gene pool is even more essential so only pedigree animals should be bred. This should be to work towards a common objective for the breed. If the pedigree isn’t known, there’s less chance it will be used for breeding which could mean it being sold for less.
Avoiding Inbreeding
Inbreeding is when two animals who are closely related breed. Back breeding is similar and both can result in a higher chance of undesired recessive traits which can effect an animals health.
The closer the COI number gets to 1, the higher chance of the animal inheriting two copies of the same allele from an ancestor that is present on each side of the pedigree. At around 10% COI, offspring are less vigorous and are more prone to what would normally be a recessive mutation.
If pedigree data isn’t recorded in any breeding programme, it could be easy to accidentally breed two closely related animals. This could result in a variety of health issues and undesirable recessive traits becoming dominant.
It's our goal at Cloud-Lines to work this out for you to make breeding decisions easy.
Try your FREE TRIAL today to see how you can benefit from pedigree recording and our Stud Selector tool.