Like Engend’ring Like: Heredity and Animal Breeding in Early Modern England

"Robert Bakewell of Dishley Grange in Leicestershire is usually regarded as the founding father of modern farm livestock breeding, and is thought of as one of the legendary pioneers of the agricultural revolution in late eighteenth-century Britain. But Bakewell was by no means the first English breeder to practice deliberate selection of desirable qualities in his livestock. This book sets out to examine the ideas and techniques of earlier generations of agricultural and sporting improvers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and to demonstrate the earlier sources of many of Bakewell's opinions and procedures. It reviews the relationships which may have existed between the ideas of practical animal breeders and those of philosophical naturalists with theoretical ideas about heredity. It also touches on the question of whether the stimulus for the development of new stock was provided by demand for different products or by a desire to obtain knowledge about the heredity of domestic animals." "The whole period between early domestication and recent breed history is too complex to be dealt with within the pages of this book. Therefore, I have decided to consider the history of a restricted group of species, in England, between the sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries. The species chosen are those with a central economic role in agriculture and transport: the horse, the cow and the sheep. The choice of the beginning of the period was governed by the earliest appearance of printed texts on contemporary technical and scientific matters and the survival of reasonable quantities of farm and estate accounts and other types of document relevant to this investigation, and that of the end by the publication of Arthur Young's journalistic portraits of the agricultural practice of England. This marked the opening of a period of comprehensive description of this subject by many writers such as William Marshall and the reporters working for the Board of Agriculture on the preparation of the County Reviews. This material has been so fully investigated already for its picture of agriculture between 1780 and 1820 that a re-examination appeared redundant. What questions about the period under consideration does the available evidence allow one to ask? There are clearly two central queries: (1) Did any significant changes in the economic performance of domestic species occur between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries? It will be argued that in some cases the extent of such improvements has been exaggerated but that, conversely, for some species there is evidence of changes in productive characters which may be interpreted as improvements. (2) To what causes should one ascribe any observed improvements? The answers to this question are bound to be less satisfactory than those to the first because of the multiplicity of possible causes. Three broad possibilities suggest themselves: (a) Breeders deliberately modified the economic characters of their stock to make them more profitable or more attractive by the application of selective breeding procedures employed with the object of achieving such changes. (b) The changes were the consequence of actions on the part of breeders, in management or selection, which were not specifically designed to produce the results that occurred. They may have aimed at entirely different objectives and breed improvements may have been mere by-products. (c) The changes were the accidental side effects of improvements made in general agricultural technique during this period in areas other than those of livestock breeding. For instance, better animal nutrition may have led to the natural selection of breeds better able to make use of it. None of these three possibilities may have been the decisive factor in any particular species at any specific time or place; all three may well have made some contribution. Only when one of the three was significantly more important than the others is it likely that its influence would be clear from contemporary records. The actions of breeders under points (a) and (b) above could have been influenced by opinions about the theory of heredity, or, conversely, observations on inheritance amongst their animals could have led them to articulate principles to explain the transfer of characters from one generation to the next. Generally, however, it seems that explanations of hereditary and reproductive phenomena came from philosophers and natural historians and that breeders of livestock before the nineteenth century played little part in elaborating such theory."