What are the Consequences of Inbreeding?

Darrh Bullock (University of Kentucky): When you practice inbreeding, some of the consequences are going to be things like reduced performance in general. You typically have lower reproduction rates when you practice inbreeding. You’re also going to have some reduced thriftiness because you might have some increased health issues, particularly after weaning time and just overall reduced performance on traits like growth and in future milking ability and things like that. So, we actually get just the opposite effect of what we get when we practice good crossbreeding. So with crossbreeding increased reproductive performance and general performance in the cattle. With inbreeding we get just the opposite. We get reduced performance, reduced reproduction. There’s also a greater incidence of getting a genetic defect to show up in your herd as well when you practice inbreeding. So you have some increased risk that you do need to be aware of.