01March2024

Tuliptiger asked: What is one (or as many as you want!) thing(s) you wish you people knew about animal husbandry? Either from a general citizen perspective or from the perspective of animal owners :O

Your animals will die, and you have to plan for when they do. That's it, that's the number one thought I want beamed into the brain of everyone considering an animal.

It sounds heartless, but it's the second thing you should consider after "how do I take care of this animal". Your animal might get sick, or it might get old, or it might have a gruesome accident. You don't want to have to figure out what you're going to do while your animal is actively dying.

More practically, it's good to consider your budget. Are you willing to care for an animal with a chronic health condition? What if it deteriorates? What is the minimum quality of life you're willing to maintain? A lot of these questions can have flexibility (maybe you're able to manage a diabetic cat's daily injections, but not the 24/7 care a mostly paralyzed cat would require). Most of these questions won't ever need to be answered, but knowing the answer and not needing it is much better than not knowing and having to answer it in the moment.

The other thing I want people to know is that death is not inherently negative and that meat/fur farming isn't always this evil thing. By all means protest the appalling conditions of factory farms, but don't mistake the cruelity to animals and people in those places as inherent to the practice. The average person in the industry isn't directly responsible. It's the culmination of a few hundreds of years of exploitation, out of a practice that's been sustainable for thousands of years.

Tubapun asked: What type of fur characteristics tend to be the easiest to get? What are they used for? How many generations does it typically take for a risk factor (disease susceptibility, nasal issues, ect) to become noticable? Like pugs. How many generations was it from "cute small dog" to "oh god please add genetic diversity"). What hybrid species do you most wish was viable?

Okay, this is a few different questions. To start: what fur characteristic is the easiest to get?

This is kind of a trick question. Different genetic populations have different possible traits (like fur texture), and the trick is that you don't really know what there is until it shows up in your genetic population.

The cop-out answer is "long fur", just because it's an easy thing to measure. If you really want, you could probably breed animals to have longer fur in 2-10 generations (with successing generations having longer and longer because it's pretty easy to find long-furred sires to bring into your lines).

The more interesting answer is "wool"/"wooly". There's lots of animals that can produce crimped, dense, and very soft fur (think of Angora rabbits, Texel guinea pigs, Mangalitsa pigs, ect). There's historic wool dogs, bison produce spinnable wool, and almost every other extant mammalian livestock has a wool producing variety. Humans love wool, and we've gotten it out of almost every animal we've touched.

How many generations does it typically take for a risk factor to become noticable follows that same logic, though. You're not so much breeding for these traits, they just pop up in your genetic pool. Examples of this are seen in every domestic breed-- the Sphynx cat being prone to cardiac and respiratory issues could be related to the genetics for hairlessness, or it could be that the original brood stock was coincidentally prone to those issues.

In terms of pugs, though, it's just the culmination of breeding for a specific trait while ignoring all other qualities. Same thing happens in show dachsunds, and exotic bullys, and Arabian horses. Whether it's conscious or not, the breeders of these animals think of them less as animals and more as objects that happen to be alive. It takes a lot of conviction to breed an animal that's barely able to function.

But I digress. Old English Bulldogs (a purpose bred animal for bull-baiting, a now-extinct bloodsport) date back to the early 1800s. The next step, the English Bulldog, was developed as early as 1817, and completely overtook the Old English Bulldog as bloodsports fell out of English favor circa the 1830s. The English Bulldog club started in 1878 and marks the "start" of the bulldogs-becoming-like-that. By 2018, "exotic bully"s were developed, and became the best example of what happens when you only breed for designer traits.

Yeah.

Pugs, from what I've read, have always been like that. They were designed as useless lap dogs and were appearently date back to 400 BC China, though admittedly I'm not sure if they were as defiant of God in the beginning. I wouldn't be surprised if they were but the differences in language means that Pai = "short snouted dog" and are not technically pugs as we know them. It's a dumb argument but one important to make while discussing the history of a breed.

If I could make a hybrid of any two animals, it would be pigeons and rabbits. I feel the reasons behind this will be obvious to long-time readers.