Natural History

Robert Bakewell

Selective breeding was a major leap forward in agricultural production and producing working animals. Animals could be bred that were far better performers than anyone had imagined. Although selective breeding of one sort or another was probably evident in the earliest domesticated populations, the really intense selective breeding that I’m describing has its roots in the eighteenth century. In fact, the methodology behind this sort of selective breeding can be traced to a single individual named Robert Bakewell.

Who?

Well, when I studied history in high school, we learned about the Industrial Revolution. We learned about how it started in England in the late eighteenth century, then spread to America and Europe in following decades. We learned about James Watt’s steam engine, Josiah Wedgwood’s industrial pottery factories, and James Hargreaves’s spinning Jenny. What we didn’t learn is that none of these technological advances on their own would have spurred the Industrial Revolution.

You see, none of it would have been possible without the development of efficient agriculture. How on earth do you feed such a large population of workers who are engaged in industrial enterprises without efficient agricultural production?  The answer is that you simply cannot.

And that’s why we have to go back a bit.  In 1688, James II was overthrown by some parliamentarians, who supported the Dutch Stadtholder William of Orange. When William of Orange became William III, the great instability that had consumed England throughout the seventeenth century was over and the landed gentry could now take on more interesting enterprises, including creating more efficient agriculture.

Now, at the same time, England was losing its open field system of agriculture.  This was a communal system of agriculture that was rather inefficient, but it was deeply a part of rural England’s culture and way of life.

The days of these common meadows, fields, and pastures had been drawing to a close since the twelfth century, when the nobles began to enclose the land to maintain flocks of sheep. The wool trade was very profitable for these landowners, and they began to claim ownership of the old manors and build fences. The end of the common lands is called the Enclosure, and by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was well in force. The wool trade was so much more profitable than grain farming.

A certain amount of the political strife that hit England (and later the whole of Britain and Ireland) in the seventeenth century is thought to have been caused in part by conflicts over the Enclosure.

Indeed, we have a very good example in the case of the Diggers. When Charles I was overthrown following the English Civil War, a large number of protestant dissenter groups popped up. The Diggers were one of these groups. Their leader, Gerard Winstanley, argued that the common people should set up common farm lands once again. Now, only 100-200 people every actually did this, but  those that did were not well-received by the land owners and were driven from their communes. But it was only out of an environment in which large numbers of peasantry were driven off their lands during the enclosures that any such movement would have ever developed.

Of course, the Restoration and then the Glorious Revolution put an end to all of that. But England had a problem. It had a massive peasant population with no work and no food. Political instability could be in the offing at any time.

Technology saved the day.

Jethro Tull’s seed drill began the process of converting what was once feudal England into a efficient agriculture state.  His drill allowed farmers to plant seed in rows with fewer laborers. Of course, many farmers hated that idea because if agriculture needed fewer workers, then these people were going to lose their jobs. It took decades for his seed drill to be fully adopted in England.

Then the Rotherham plow and Scots plow  were major improvements on the previous plow technology. Now,  even fewer laborers were needed plant the same fields, and because they were lighter and more controllable, more land could be cultivated faster.

But you still needed lots of people for the harvest, so the farm laborers were still needed. Agricultural production, though, was higher than it had ever been.

Then Andrew Meikle’s threshing machine took hold, and now it was possible to harvest without large numbers of laborers. The development of this device actually did cause some political instability in the early nineteenth century. Because the farm workers were no longer needed, they were now out of a job. Some of them got together and rose against the technology and the land owners.

But in an essence, the British Agricultural Revolution was the precursor of the Industrial Revolution. Without the former, you would have no efficient agriculture and no large numbers of people work in the factories. Indeed, it would have been impossible to have any kind of agricultural society without efficient agriculture, especially if the inefficient agriculture also created a common good that protected labor from ever having to work for wages.

Now, out of this same innovative society was born Robert Bakewell. He was an eighteenth century farmer from Dishley Grange, Leicestershire.  He had been able to go abroad in the Low Countries to observe their agricultural practices, and he returned to his ancestral farm eager to begin agricultural experiments.

His findings added to the knowledge about irrigation and crop rotation, but he’s best known for coming up with modern selective breeding.  He was the first person to suggest that male animals be kept separate from females. He figured out that one could selectively breed cattle that fattened really easily, horses that could pull a plow better than any other, and sheep with long wool.

He is responsible for making a breed of cattle that we call the English longhorn the first major beef producing breed. It had historically been the landrace  draft oxen breed of Northern England, but with Bakewell’s selective breeding, the animals were gaining in size rapidly. They were fattening easily, and the animals were producing beeves unlike any anyone had seen before. These animals were more efficient in that the could produce more meat on the same land, and that certainly added to the efficiency of English agriculture.

He took the Lincoln Longwool sheep and bred it to be larger  and with a finer bone. He also bred its wool to be longer and more lustrous, and he also selected for a square conformation and a level topline. This breed exists as a separate breed today, which we today call the English Leicester or Leicester Longwool.

Another of his accomplishments was the development of the big black cart horse, which he called the” Improved Black Cart horse.”  The animals were the result of breeding the Old English black horse to the heavy draft animals from the Netherlands and Flanders. He developed two different types of horse, the Fen or Linconshire type and the Midlands or Leicester type. These animals eventually became known as “Bakewell blacks” or “English cart horses.” These were very powerful animals that attained great size and strength. Indeed, their descendants are the Shire horses, which are the largest breed of domestic horse.

Bakewell’s accomplishments were done without Mendel’s genetics or Darwin’s understanding of artificial and natural selection. He simply selected which animals were bred together. That’s a revolutionary idea. In fact, it is well-known that both Jefferson and Washington were influenced by these ideas, and they tried to improve their own lines of domestic animals using these practices. They also did all they could to encourage American farmers to do the same– with limited success.

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Selective breeding allows the breeder to improve his or her stock. It has been a major success as its practice has been further improved with our understanding of genetics.

But selective breeding has been going on long enough for us to understand that sometimes selective breeding has unintended consequences.

For example, when the Soviet geneticist Dmitri Belyaev began to breed for tameness in the silver fox, he did get very tame silver foxes. He also wound up producing foxes that were spotted– some of them marked like border collies. These were, of course, useless as fur-bearers.  But the results did show how selecting for a trait can also include selection for other traits. Belyaev selected for lower adrenaline levels in his foxes, but adrenaline is believed to share a biochemical pathway with melanin, which controls pigment. When he selected for lower adrenaline, he was also selecting for lower melanin. You breed for tame foxes, and you get tame ones with spots.

We’ve seen similar results in broiler chickens. Temple Grandin theorized that the selection for larger breast in broiler chickens actually made the roosters very aggressive and also selected for roosters that did not give off the appropriate courtship behaviors. As a result, a large number of roosters used in producing broilers are so aggressive and libidinous that they rape then hens with whom they mate and then kill them. In her recent work, though, Grandin feels that this isn’t correct. In breeding for heavier breasted chickens, the broiler breeders have produced chickens that have reduced fertility, which is why the roosters don’t demonstrate the courtship behaviors. To correct, this problem, the breeders have selected for what they observe to be higher sex drive in their roosters. However, what they were observing may not have been sex drive at all. It may have been aggression. So the broiler breeders have selected for chickens with big breasts and very low fertility and sex drive. But those roosters that do have fertility and sex drive are so aggressive towards the hens that they kill them after they mate with them. And all of those were the result of several unintended consequences in selective breeding. It has been a real selective breeding comedy of errors.

And dogs are hardly immune. Take English springer spaniels in North America and English cocker spaniels in Europe. Both of these dogs are required to have a lunging gait in dog shows. Well, it turns out that breeding for that lunging gait also predisposes the dogs to a disorder called “avalanche of rage syndrome.” This syndrome is characterized with dogs that are normally quite docile suddenly attacking people, objects, or other animals for no reason. Now, neither of those breeds is required to show any aggression in their working behavior. Indeed, these dogs are often recommended as family pets. However, no one wants a dog that suddenly goes for the children, but it turns out that this syndrome was selected for when they began breeding for that particular gait.

Now, the other problem that exists with selective breeding is when the selection begins to push the animal away from a health conformation. Bakewell’s longhorns are virtually unknown these days. You see they were bred to be so squarely-built and so massive that they began to lose hardiness. As a result, the British began to keep the shorthorn breed instead, which replaced the longhorn by the mid-nineteenth century. (It, in turn, was replaced by the Hereford, which is now being replaced by the “Black Angus,” which is strain of the breed more widely known as the Aberdeen-Angus).

Most turkeys that are mass-produced for the table cannot breed naturally. Indeed, virtually all turkeys that can be purchased at the supermarket have been the result of artificially inseminated. Most strains of these turkeys have been selected for huge breast. But over the generations, this selective breeding has produced tom turkeys that cannot mount the hens. They are simply too massive to do so. Some defective toms are produced that are so massive in the breast that they cannot stand up.

In domestic dogs, the ability of the animal to develop unusual and novel body shapes, colors, coat-types, and sizes is reaching its breaking point. We now have dogs that are so distorted from what could be considered healthy conformation. Today we have pekes and bulldogs without muzzles, dachshunds that are built like weasels, German shepherds that stumble around with their sloped backs and weirdly angulated hindquarters, extremely small Chihuahuas and Yorkies,  and many other distortions of the basic canine shape. And who knows what sort of genetic disorders have resulted from this sort of selective breeding?

Selective breeding allowed us to get better performances out of our domestic animals. We cannot deny this fact. However, as we have seen how selective breeding has progressed since its earliest days, we need to be aware that selective breeding for one trait can sometimes lead to selecting for deleterious traits. And sometimes selective breeding can lead to unhealthy exaggeration.

Thus, we have to be aware that selective breeding can sometimes yield unintended consequence. The legacy of Robert Bakewell is that selective breeding can lead to increased performance in our domestic animals. However, we need to be certain that our selective processes don’t produce these unintended consequences.

And that’s why breeders of all sorts of domestic animals need to understand fully the traits for which they are selecting.