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Livestock Records of Performance and Their Value to the Meat Industry

Armour's Livestock Bureau

Abstract

Apparently the traits which give value to the meat animal are the most complex characteristics with which we must deal in livestock breeding. They are not dependent on individual single units of heredity, but on aggregates of such factors, many of which may be transmitted independently. We are involved with the phenomena of quantitative inheritance; and genetic knowledge, despite its forward strides since the war, has not yet advanced so as to permit control of this inheritance through the genotypes involved. We must still base our progress on the phaenotypes, or the developed characters of the body, rather than on the germplasm.

Geneticists agree that quantitative inheritance is just as strictly Mendelian as the inheritance of color, horns, and other relatively simple characters, but analysis has not been possible because we could not afford to use the numbers necessary for adequate investigation, to say nothing of the time required in such slowly reproducing species as cattle.