British Association Discussions: Horizons in Animal Production

Abstract

THE discussion on animal production in Section M (Agriculture) of the British Association at Cambridge on August 23 had one excellent result: it demonstrated very clearly indeed the inseparableness of the three main constituents-animal husbandry (the feeding and management of livestock), animal breeding and disease-control. Gone, it would seem, are the days when the animal nutritionist claimed that feeding was more important than breeding ; or the geneticist, that breeding was more important than feeding ; or the animal pathologist, that control of disease was a laboratory problem divorced alike from heredity and husbandry. This is not to say that specialists in each of the three fields have, so far, been wasting their time, for there is plenty of evidence to show that in explaining and improving existing practices they have done very necessary work. The animal geneticist, for example, although he has been unable to direct the emergence of strikingly new and improved types of livestock, has been able to interpret the mechanisms of heredity, to define the prerequisites for successful in-breeding and to examine the significance of mutations.