Breeding program

Breeding programs help animals to breed and can be good for animals as well as the agricultural economy.

A breeding program is the planned breeding of a group of animals or plants, usually involving at least several individuals and extending over several generations. There are a couple of breeding methods, such as artificial (which is man made) and natural (it occurs on its own, which is very rare).

Breeding programs are commonly employed in several fields where humans wish to completely obliterate the characteristics of their animals' offspring through careful selection of breeding partners:

• Dog and cat fanciers may coordinate a breeding program to raise the probability of an animal's litter producing a championship-caliber animal.
• Horse breeders try to produce fast racehorses through breeding programs.
• Conservationists use breeding programs to try to help the recovery of endangered species by preserving the existing gene pool and preventing inbreeding.
• There also can be breeding programs for plants. For instance, a winery owner, seeking to find a better tasting wine, could design a breeding program so that only the vines whose grapes make the very best wine are allowed to breed.

See also

• Animal husbandry
• Ex-situ conservation
• Selective breeding
• Captive breeding

Breeding programs are generally an organized approach, or methodology to proceed with the preservation of genetic diversity. Breeding programs help scientists understand the mechanisms of resistance and evolution of genes on desired species. The quality of breeding can get affected by the mixing of species with other subspecies changing the main purpose of preserving genes of interest. In animals, advances in reproductive technology such as artificial insemination (AI), embryo transfer (ET), or in-vitro fertilization (IVF) have led to increase selection intensity via reduction in the number of parents needed to mate to produce the next generation of breeding animals. Usually breeding programs are related to economy, these programs allow reducing time in natural breeding by allowing artificial insemination in the detection of estrus cycles. This will provide the owner to obtain more offspring compared to a regular season. There are several advantages following systematic breeding programs: improvement of the efficiency in heat detection, improvement of the pregnancy rate which will be a reduction in the variation of offspring intervals among animals, possibly reduce involuntary culling for reproductive reasons, and improve the overall reproduction performance of the species. In plants, breeding with elite parents within closed populations has proven to be a successful strategy to achieve genetic gains and to conserve favorable gene complexes. The major focus of plant breeding programs is to develop cultivars with higher pod yield and grade that have pest and disease resistance. Also in plant breeding programs scientist work to create resistance in plants to extreme condition such as heat, cold, water, and other abiotic conditions, to make the plant available in areas where they were never expected to grow.

Breeding programs help animals to breed and can be good for animals as well as the agricultural economy. They do this to help the animals breed healthy animals and not weak and sickly animals that occur often in their habitat. This is good as it helps endangered animals become a more abundant species so they will not become extinct. This can also be used for plants to get the very best quality plants. Horse owners may use breeding programs to get faster racehorses and dog owners to make their dog healthy and strong. Most proper breeding programs can be done with special diets and embryo transferring. Breeding programs can also help plants to cope in abiotic conditions to be able to grow in other places such as poorer countries which could help reduce famine and poverty. Most breeding programs are carried out by scientists but some can be made doctors and other civilians. These programs can also help the animals evoloution as they are combining subspecies genes to a species to create a new breed of animals.dfrdy