- Mating involves finding a suitable partner among the selected parents and produce offspring.
- Mating decisions have no influence on genetic improvement at population level, but may have some influence at individual level.
- Compensatory mating involves finding the best mate to compensate the female’s shortcomings.
- Mate selection should take into account the additive genetic relationship between the potential parents as that reflects directly the inbreeding coefficient in the intended offspring.
- Unbalanced mating intensity may have irreversible consequences for the rate of inbreeding in future generations.
- There is a conflict of interest between short term benefit (profit for producer and breeder) and long term cost (inbreeding related problems) of intensive use of genetically superior animals.
- DNA tests can be used to confirm parentage of offspring.
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