A couple of months ago (16 May to be precise), I listened to a talk by Temple Grandin at the Roslin Institute.

Grandin is a captivating speaker, and as an animal scientist (of some kind), I’m happy to have heard her talk at least once. The lecture contained a mix of:

• practical experiences from a career of troubleshooting livestock management and systems,
• how thinking differently (visually) helps in working with animal behaviour,
• terrific personal anecdotes, among other things about starting up her business as a livestock management consultant from a student room,
• a recurring theme, throughout the talk, of unintended side-effects in animal breeding, framed as a risk of ”overselecting” for any one trait, uncertainty about ”what is optimal”, and the importance of measuring and soberly evaluating many different things about animals and systems.

This latter point interests me, because it concerns genetics and animal breeding. Judging by the question in the Q&A, it also especially interested rest of the audience, mostly composed of vet students.

Grandin repeatedly cautioned against ”overselecting”. She argued that if you take one trait, any trait, and apply strong directional selection, bad side-effects will emerge. As a loosely worded biological principle, and taken to extremes, this seems likely to be true. If we assume that traits are polygenic, that means both that variants are likely to be pleiotropic (because there are many causal variants and a limited number of genes; this one argument for the omnigenic model) and that variants are likely to be linked to other variants that affect other traits. So changing one trait a lot is likely to affect other traits. And if we assume that the animal was in a pretty well-functioning state before selection, we should expect that if some trait that we’re not consciously selecting on changes far enough from that state, that is likely to cause problems.

We can also safely assume that there are always more traits that we care about than we can actually measure, either because they haven’t become a problem yet, or because we don’t have a good way to measure them. Taken together, this sound like a case for being cautious, measuring a lot of things about animal performance and welfare, and continuously re-evaluating what one is doing. Grandin emphasised the importance of measurement, drumming in that: ”you will manage what you measure”, ”this happens gradually”, and therefore, there is a risk that ”the bad becomes the new normal” if one does not keep tabs on the situation by recording hard quantitative data.

Doesn’t this sound a lot like the conventional view of mainstream animal breeding? I guess it depends: breeding is a big field, covering a lot of experiences and views, from individual farmers’ decisions, through private and public breeding organisations, to the relative Castalia of academic research. However, the impression from my view of the field, is Grandin and mainstream animal breeders are in agreement about the importance of:

1. recording lots of traits about all aspects of the performance and functioning of the animal,
2. optimising them with good performance on the farm as the goal,
3. constantly re-evaluating practice and updating the breeding goals and management to keep everything on track.

To me, what Grandin presented as if it was a radical message (and maybe it was, some time ago, or maybe it still is, in some places) sounded much like singing the praises of economic selection indices. I had expected something more controversial. Then again, that depends on what assumptions are built into words like ”good performance”, ”on track”, ”functioning of the animal” etc. For example, she talked a bit about the strand of animal welfare research that aims to quantify positive emotions in animals; one could take the radical stance that we should measure positive emotions and include that in the breeding goal.

”Overselection” as a term also carries connotations that I don’t agree with, because I don’t think that the framing as biological overload is helpful. To talk about overload and ”overselection” makes one think of selection as a force that strains the animal in itself, and the alternative as ”backing off” (an expression term Grandin repeatedly used in the talk). But if the breeding goal is off the mark, in the sense that it doesn’t get towards what’s actually optimal for the animal on the farm, breeding less efficiently is not getting you to a better outcome; it only gets towards the same, suboptimal, outcome more slowly. The problem isn’t efficiency in itself, but misspecification, and uncertainty about what the goal should be.

Grandin expands on this idea in the introductory chapter to ”Are we pushing animals to their biological limits? Welfare and ethical applications” (Grandin & Whiting 2018, eds). (I don’t know much about the pig case used as illustration, but I can think of a couple of other examples that illustrate the same point.) It ends with this great metaphor about genomic power tools, that I will borrow for later:

We must be careful not to repeat the mistakes that were made with conventional breeding where bad traits were linked with desirable traits. One of the best ways to prevent this is for both animal and plant breeders to do what I did in the 1980s and 1990s: I observed many different pigs from many places and the behaviour problems became obvious. This enabled me to compare animals from different lines in the same environment. Today, both animal and plant breeders have ‘genomic power tools’ for changing an organism’s genetics. Power tools are good things, but they must be used carefully because changes gan be made more quickly. A circular saw can chop your hand off much more easily than a hand saw. It has to be used with more care.