Quote:
Originally Posted by lungs
I'll preface this post by saying that I don't know a whole lot about horse racing or horses in general. But I do have a strong background in animal genetics, and I am in charge of genetic matings of 700 dairy cattle. I believe this post is spot on.
I can't speak for horses, like I said before, but in dairy cattle we've seen a lot of problems arise in the past 10-15 years due to breeding philosophies that fit only specific desires of the humans making selections. Inbreeding has run rampant.
Anytime humans are making decisions on how to mate animals, they are making the decisions to fit their purposes. In the case of these race horses, they focused on speed but seem to have neglected other aspects.
I am curious, how much inbreeding goes on with these race horses?
It's too bad that humans outside of West Virginia have figured out that inbreeding doesn't work amongst ourselves yet continue to do so with our animals. In the case of my cattle, selection for insane amounts of milk production has been the norm, but now I've hit the emergency brakes on that theory and my philosophy is now centered on survivability. It'd probably be hard to back off selecting for speed in horse racing, but I think it's clear that they could use a little more genetic diversity.
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Inbreeding is fairly common but it's always several generations back - so you'll see a horse who's father's father is Northern Dancer (for example) and then you'll also see Northern Dancer somewhere on the mother's side. In fact it's often considered beneficial as far as racing ability is concerned while apparently ignoring the potential genetic issues it could cause.
Edit: Or, at least, it was fairly common about a decade ago which would have been the last time I really looked into it. Breeders may have decided to move away from that practice since then.
Edit again: In fact, here's the pedigree of
Big Brown (pdf file). Note that he has Northern Dancer on both sides.