Bred for Perfection: Shorthorn Cattle, Collies, and Arabian Horses since 1800 (review)

Livestock and pet breeding are still based on an institution that arose in England in the eighteenth century, the published pedigree. Margaret C. Derry, a cattle breeder and artist as well as a historian of science, is splendidly qualified to explain the ways of animal improvement to both scholars and enthusiasts.

Derry begins with an overview of modern purebred breeding concepts. The first steps were taken by the late-eighteenth-century English breeder Robert Bakewell, who worked with horses, sheep, and cattle to enhance strength in the first case and meat yield in the second two. Bakewell's system was to use inbreeding to select for economically valuable characteristics, creating breeds defined through male lines. He was also the first to recognize progeny testing, selecting breeding animals not only for their own characteristics but also for their consistency in transmitting these to offspring. Meanwhile, the rise of thoroughbred racing and efforts to combat misrepresentation of horses' ages and ancestries led to the creation of the (privately kept) General Stud Book. Here, each horse's identity, age, and ancestry could be fixed.

The public pedigree, combined with Bakewell's methods, became a powerful marketing tool. Already in the early nineteenth century, English landowners were shifting from cereal to livestock agriculture, looking for more productive breeds. Thomas Bates developed a highly inbred line of shorthorn cattle, the Duchesses, with bulky bodies, short legs, and small heads. Breeders, farmers, and investors adored them and began to pay premium prices in part because their purity could be verified in a new public breed book. With North American expansion, the international market boomed, and new herd books were established in the United States and Canada that documented "purity." Eligibility of their animals for these books could enrich farmers or ruin them; registration assured duty-free importation. The shorthorn type remains influential even in contemporary breeds.

The rise of the collie was indicative of the spread of public registries and inbreeding from livestock to companion animals. Greyhound racing, once socially exclusive, became mass sport, with its own studbook like that of thoroughbred racing. Dog shows evolved from poultry exhibitions, and Queen Victoria herself began the influential dog-loving tradition that British royalty continues to this day. Dog fanciers in the United States took the lead in maintaining studbooks. The collie was one of the first dogs bred for show by specialty clubs. As a herding dog, it was also one of the first bred both as a working animal and as a show dog, diverging into breeds as different as the Australian shepherd (originally American), the border collie, and the collies of the show ring. Prized by high society and celebrated by the American writer and breeder Albert Payson Terhune, the collie also was one of the first breeds to engender a debate about whether the aesthetics of dog showing endangered the working abilities, health, and temperament of dogs.

Derry's third example is the Arabian horse—another breed developed partly in response to North American demand. (The English remained more loyal to the thoroughbred.) In this case the paradox was that the purity of the breed depended on tracing all lines back to the Bedouin, whose own breeding concepts, emphasizing the female line, were not fully understood and diverged from European methods. Attracted by large potential profits and the mystique of the breed, individuals and governments in Poland, Egypt, and Russia established their own breeding centers. The novelist Walter Farley won admirers for the Arabian horse as Terhune had done for the collie.

Bred for Perfection offers a succession of fascinating insights that will intrigue even historians with little previous interest in agriculture or sports. It shows the tension between appearance and utility, as well as unfounded beliefs about traits like color even among working farmers, to be longstanding controversies (the prized Duchess cattle ultimately died out because inbreeding had accentuated their infertility). It highlights the paradox that the "foundation...