Animal breeding

Selecting for breeding animals with superior EBV in growth rate, egg, meat, milk, or wool production, or with other desirable traits has revolutionized livestock production throughout the entire world.

When individuals are looking to breed animals, they look for certain valuable traits in purebred animals, or may intend to use some type of crossbreeding to produce a new type of stock with different, and presumably superior abilities in a given area of endeavor.

Such animals can be recorded with a breed registry, the organisation that maintains pedigrees and/or stud books.

The observable phenomenon of hybrid vigor stands in contrast to the notion of breed purity.

But this is highly unusual and difficult to do for most organisms, in whose populations all individuals harbor recessive, deleterious gene variants (alleles).