Hello reader, today I am going to explain what selective breeding is, the pros and cons of it, and what limitations it has.
Selective Breeding is when people have found a trait that they want to amplify in a species, so they breed the organisms with these traits and keep on doing that until they have what they see as the “perfect” specimen of the said organism. This is done so people can have the best of what they can, maybe for the best quality milk, the best dogs to pull sleighs, or even the best horses for war, or chickens for eggs.
There are pros and cons to selective breeding. Some of the pros are that you can breed a species to have a better quality of life, breed them so they can become stronger, faster, or even better hidden. You can selectively breed most animals for just about anything, good or bad. Some of the cons are that while you may get what you want, you also have a good chance of failure, new diseases, deformities, rapid change in behavior. There are many ways for selective breeding to go south, but there are also so many ways it can be great.
Pioneering scientists all around the world are working to perfect the art of selective breeding, so that one day, we do not have deformed or diseased animals, and our animal products are purer and protected from any negative things that could affect people or the environment.
In class over the last couple weeks, we learned about why people might use genetic modification or bioengineering (GMO or BE) to breed out problems that plants or animals have. As an example, people will not buy vegetables that are bruised. So scientists used bioengineering to make potatoes that don't bruise so easily from storage. They also developed corn that was resistant to pesticides used on corn worms, because people don't want to buy corn that has a worm eating it.
My opinion is that GMO or BE is something that we should not yet be using. We should wait until we know it is a low to no risk opportunity, by only doing so in controlled environments and only use the animals that are necessary. I believe this because I am a whole-hearted supporter for natural selection. I think that we should let nature take its course and only intervene when our aid is necessary for the survival of a species, and simply live with potatoes with dark spots and corn with worms in them. We should live and eat the way our grandparents and great grandparents did. If you have a problem with something, fix it yourself, because if you’re not willing to help fix an issue, I do not believe you should have the right to complain about it and expect others to fix what’s wrong.
In conclusion, as a human species, we should take a good long look at the problem, then look in the mirror, because most of the time we very well may be part of the issue.