Category: Livestock

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Bad news from Tehran

In addition to everything else, it seems that the Turkman horse is under threat of extinction. 1 The problem seems to be interbreeding with Throughbreds, and owners unwilling to risk pure-bred Turkmen horses, which are expensive, in races where there is a risk of injury and prize money is low. According to one expert:

Iranian horses have unique features such as smartness, nobility, special physical conditions and high endurance level which cannot be observed in any of the imported horses.

Among the proposals to save the Turkmen horse are a genebank (not sure how that would work) and a breed register, which would probably require DNA testing for individuals.

The Byerly Turk
The Byerly Turk

One thing puzzles me. In the very restricted genetic bottleneck that resulted in the English Thoroughbred is a fine animal known as The Byerly Turk. Was it really a Turk? Wikipedia thinks not. More to the point, one can only be grateful that the English did not decry all that messy genetic pollution that gave rise to the English Thoroughbred.

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Livestock landraces and marginality in Europe

goats

Visually, by comparing the map of INDEX2 (Fig. 6) [right] with the one of the distribution of breeds (Fig. 2) [left], it can be seen that the studied breeds seem to be consistently located in regions defined as marginal by the indices.

Well, maybe. Click on the image to see better. But it seems a stretch to me, and the more rigorous logit analysis that the authors subject the data to isn’t exactly overwhelming. If I understand it correctly, the best that a combination of various proxies for marginality can do in predicting the presence of local sheep and goat breeds is 19%. And that’s with breed distribution data which seems to be biased towards marginal areas anyway.

Local sheep and goat breeds are generally argued to be remarkably well adapted to marginal rural areas.

That’s certainly a dominant meta-narrative, and not just for livestock, for agrobiodiversity as a whole. I may even believe it. But not a huge amount of evidence for it here.

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Nibbles: Agroforestry, Forecasts, Coffee, Pigs, GIS, Potatoes

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Linking up livestock databases

The object of most biodiversity web sites in animal agriculture is the ‘breed’ or population, and not the individual animal within (an exception are some breed societies which present individual animal data on some of their most important breeding animals). With the linkage of CryoWEB and FABISnet, for the first time, production type databases with individual animal records are directly linked to the global breeds database network, thereby creating breeds statistics in FABISnet which are directly derived from production data. Perhaps the procedure can also be a model for other data in the biodiversity databases.

That’s from a piece on animal genetic resources databases by Elldert Groeneveld of the Institute of Farm Animal Genetic in Germany, published as article of the month in the Globaldiv Newsletter. It’s entitled Databases and Biodiversity: From Single Databases to a Global Network and you can find it on page 8. I suppose there is a similar problem in crops, where you might have evaluation data for various different lines selected from a single population. But somehow you don’t hear so much about it. Is it that the links between conservationists and users (that is, those doing the evaluation) are better developed in the livestock field?