Breeding and Breed

In this chapter we discuss the history of the breeding of domesticated animals and how this practice produced varieties of animals with ‘breeding’, and that since the late-eighteenth century have been termed ‘breeds’. We consider the evolution of ideas on selective breeding through the nineteenth century and end with an assessment of the impact of the ideas of Gregor Mendel and the science of genetics in the twentieth century. From the eighteenth century breeders have continually claimed to be making their enterprise ‘scientific’, yet at the same time, and with equal fervour, they asserted that it was also an ‘art’ that relied upon tacit and incommunicable knowledge. This ambivalence runs through the history of breeding to the present day. The notion of ‘breeds’ was first developed with livestock and then transferred to thoroughbred horses, poultry and pigeons, and then to domestic dogs and cats. Breed embodied contemporary assumptions about heredity that are captured in terms such as ‘purebred’, ‘bloodline’, ‘pedigree’, ‘inbred’ and ‘mongrel’. However, there is also something modern about the term. The physical form of breeds as standardised, uniform animals, broken down into points or parts, was in many ways analogous with industrial invention, design, standardisation and manufacture.