Breeding techniques in Captive

animals
• As a hobby breeder, breeding rats to involves a combination of breeding methods.
• Starting with high quality rats and using
– inbreeding,
– Line breeding and
– Outcrosses
• will help a breeder to reach the goal of improvement in the line.
• Breed should encompass the three factors:
– health,
– Normal body temperament, and
– Conformation (normal shape without deformities).
 Line breeding
• Line breeding is a term that breeders use to denote a family of inbred rats that
begins with a single or pair of foundation rats. Rat’s within a line will have the
same (or closely) lineage.
• A line is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as:
1: Family, lineage
2: a strain produced and maintained especially by selective breeding.
• A line does not happen over night, it can take years and involves multiple inbred
and line bred generations.
• Linebreeding is used to set certain traits as well as to eliminate negative ones.
•
 Inbreeding
• Definition: The interbreeding of closely related individuals especially to preserve
and fix desirable characters of and to eliminate unfavorable characters from a
stock.
• Test breeding the siblings and/or breeding an offspring back to the parent can help
to identify undesirable traits by doubling up on the recessives of the two different
parents.
 Outcrossing
• a cross between relatively unrelated individuals or to cross with a relatively
unrelated individual or strain.
• Outcrossing is done to introduce new traits that are missing from a line.
• Type & Outcrossing
• Altering color
– The coat color of a rat can be altered by breeding it to a rat of a different color
and then back breeding to the outcrossed parent.
– Breeding to a rat with an eye dilution can also change the color in a line. On
the other hand, strengthening a color can be achieved by breeding to rats
carrying less dilutions.
• Modifying Physical Structure
– Outcrossing can be a used as a tool to improve eyes or ears (shape,
placement, or size). It can also be used in hopes of improving the size, shape,
and/or length of the body, the head, or the tail.
• Adding or Modifying Patterns or Markings
– Breeding to marked or patterned rats can enable you to add or improve the
trait in your line.
• Health Issues & Outcrossing
– Outcrossing can be used to improve vigor in a line that has been inbred or
linebred for many generations if the litters appear to become consistently
smaller or the pups no longer have the strong health (vigor) or size that is
normally seen in that line.
 Fundaments of mouse breeding
• The laboratory mouse is playing an increasingly important role in biomedical
research.
• Due to mutagenesis, transgenic, and gene-targeting technologies, the number of
available mouse models are most usable.
• Some fundaments should be known before start breeding.
– Sexual maturity: Generally, laboratory mice become sexually mature between
fi ve and eight weeks of age.
– Reproductive life span. Typically, laboratory mice can breed for about 7-8
months,
– Fertility: Fertility of inbred strains varies.
– Gestation: varies between strain
– Generation time. Generation time in laboratory mice is about 12 weeks: ~3
weeks gestation, 3- 4 weeks suckling, and 5-6 weeks until sexual maturity.
– Litter size. Litter size varies among strains
– Weaning age. In a mouse husbandry context, weaning refers to removing a
pup from its home pen (rather than to the time a pup stops nursing and starts
eating solid food).
Breeding performance factors:
– Birth defects in the pups
– Hybrid vigor
– Strain-specific behaviour
– Mutation and transgene effect
– Temperature and humidity
– Light intensity and life cycle
– Noise and vibration
– Barometric pressure
– Odors Handling
– Nutrition
– Feed
– Feed placement
– Health