Most
entries here are written in English, but this is a bilingual blog since posts
addressed to a predominantly German readership will be written in German. This
is my first language, so sorry if my English is still not quite as good as it
should be.
As you’ve
probably guessed by its title, this blog focuses on a controversial topic
called “breeding-back”. Breeding-back is about trying to breed animals resembling
a certain extinct species/subspecies or wild type, mainly from living
descendants, – not just for fun, but in order to use the result as an authentic
proxy for those animals in the wild. In fact, all of the species to be
reconstructed by breeding-back are among the beasts that have been wiped out by
human activities, such as hunting or habitat destruction.
The term
was coined by two brothers back in the 1920ies who thought they could revive
extinct species (more precisely, extinct wild types of a species) by crossing
several domestic breeds they considered to be similar to the desired end
result. During the last hundred years, breeding-back experiments have been
conducted in order to reconstruct the Aurochs (the wild ancestor of cattle),
the Tarpan (the west-Eurasian Wild horse) and other types of large mammals such
as the Quagga (an extinct subspecies of the Plains zebra). There has been some effort
to rebred domestic animals as well, such as the Cumberland Pig; those projects
are not really of interest for this blog, since I want to focus on creating
proxies for extinct wild animals.
Breeding-back
usually utilizes old and less-derived domestic breeds that descend from the
animals to be rebred. These may provide interesting information on the
appearance and lifestyle of their respective extinct wild types and resemble it
to a greater or lesser extent. The evolutional process of so-called
dedomestication is closely connected to breeding-back and takes place when a
population of domestic animals is abandoned and exposed to natural selection. Consequently,
feral breeds of the species breeding-back focuses on are a very interesting
subject that I am going to cover here as well.
With this
blog I intend to provide you information on the various breeding-back attempts,
their results and the authenticity of their results, as much as on the
“material and methods” of the respective experiments and of course also the
extinct animals they focus on. I will keep you on track with the progress of breeding-back
and rewilding programmes, and share the results of my research on the extinct archetypes
and the history of existing breeding-back attempts.
Reliable
sources are not easy to find, as this field often is based on “Chinese
whispers” throughout the literature and often is surprisingly emotionalized. There
is little to no recent scientific literature on breeding-back per se. I want to provide you with unambiguous
facts behind stories and myths. But this blog won’t get along without deductive
reasoning and personal opinion. Actually, much in this field is not only about
facts but on how to interpret these facts.
Luckily,
breeding-back isn’t just something you can only read and hear about, you can
also go out and explore things for yourself. I am going to present some reports
of my various breeding-back related trips and what I might have learned from
it.
You will
also see some interviews with responsible people from different breeding-back
projects.
Something I
try to avoid is hyperbole and simplification. It should be made clear that each
human-caused extinction leaves a gap in nature that cannot be filled again, and
that breeding-back results can only imitate or approach the animals they are
bred to resemble and hopefully occupy a similar ecologic niche when released
into nature.
Having said
all that, I hope that you will enjoy this journey through an exciting field of
zoology that illustrates man’s interaction with nature as much as I do.
Just discovered your blog, Daniel, and am looking forward to going through your posts: keep it up!
ReplyDeleteHi Daniel, are you still think about publishing a book about this subject?
ReplyDeleteThat project is on ice at the moment, I dont have the time for it unfortunately.
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