Animal genetics / Frederick B. Hutt.

  • Hutt, Frederick Bruce, 1897-1991.
Date:
[1964]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Animal genetics / Frederick B. Hutt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    13/578 (page V)
    Preface This book is written primarily for students in agricultural and veterinary colleges. Most of such students, although tolerant of the fruit flies that abound in texts on genetics, are really more inter¬ ested in knowing how heredity affects cattle, sheep, dogs, and other domestic animals. The classes I have taught during the past two decades have been interested in genetics chiefly from that stand¬ point. As my aim is to teach principles of genetics, it became evi¬ dent that the interests of both teacher and students could best be met by illustrating those principles insofar as possible with examples drawn from domestic animals. That is what I have done in my lec¬ tures and in this book. It is hoped that these pages will offer useful guidance not only to students but also to all who are concerned with the important practical applications of animal genetics. Apart from my students, practicing veterinarians, teachers in agri¬ culture, county agents, and animal breeders have sought help on genetic problems. These all had one thing in common; they wanted to know more about heredity in relation to domestic animals than they could find in the existing books on genetics. In this book I have tried not to skimp on principles, but, with the hope that the reader's interest will be sustained to the bitter end, to show how those principles operate in domestic animals. A series of pertinent problems is appended to each chapter. Stu¬ dents seem to understand the principles better when they have been forced by such problems to apply those principles to new situations that were not used as illustrative material in class. However, as the kind of problem beginning When a bald-headed man whose mother was an albiness marries a normal woman whose brother had hemo¬ philia . . fails to engender in students much sympathy for the hypothetical fruits of that hypothetical union, a special effort has been made over the years to accumulate problems dealing with actual cases in real animals. The results have been so much ap¬ preciated that (marvellous to relate!) I am repeatedly asked to provide more of your kind of problems. That collection is here made available to readers of this book. Each chapter also includes V