Quote:
Originally Posted by hellosugaree
None of what breeders do is natural anyway so I don't think this really matters either way. In nature, offspring are selected based on their ability to survive and reproduce. Their survival depends on their fitness for their particular environment, and stochastic events (doesn't matter how wonderful a baby is if a tree happens to fall on it before it can produce offspring). Passing on one's own genetics also depends on an individual's ability to find mates. If you live 9000 years but can't find a mate, you aren't going to figure into the gene pool.
In a breeding situation, we are choosing who to breed with whom. Even if you breed all wild-caught original lines or whatever, the breeder is going to have an influence anyway. Even if you randomly select pairs, you are still influencing the genetics. If you take a wild population and capture half the individuals and randomly breed them for 100 years, and then let the other half do it naturally, you'll undoubtedly have differences, even if the individuals in the two groups are exactly matched. As a breeder you have no way of determining which animal would have a better chance to mate in the wild, or which mother will be more likely to protect her eggs well in the wild, even if she does it fine in your plastic box.
My main point is that you can't be a purist or whatever you want to call it and preserve a natural gene pool anyway, so why pretend like you are? Since you are introducing artificial selection, or at the very least removing normal selective pressures, then why not have some fun?
No matter how hard you try, you're never going to be nature. So why bother trying?
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I agree!
Also just as a little fun fact there was a species of deer or moose (something with horns not antlers and yes I know deer and moose have antlers) that evolved its self out of existance. Females kept selecting males with the largest horns. So offspring kept being born with larger and larger horns. Eventually the horns became too large and too heavy and the males would snap their necks under the weight of the massive horns before reaching sexual maturity. So natural selection killed the species.
But yes I think hybrids are fine so long as no animal is harmed and they are marketed as such.
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