Question: What are your views and breeding different species of animals (eg. Zebra and Horse)?

Shikha Sharma answered on 8 Nov 2014:

Hi Giller,

Another interesting question … I believe selective breeding or artificial selection is good till it involves professional breeder who designs and conduct the experiment. There are so many good examples of crossbreeds where breeders have selected “superior qualities” to develop a superior bloodline in certain traits in comparison to the parents. Dogs are one of the good examples of selective breeding which allowed us to have dogs with various sizes from a Chihuahua to Great Danes. Any hybrid can be developed by crossing animals from different species, but from the same genus. The process of cross breeding could be painful for the animals as it is not their natural behaviour…That’s the sad part of this research.
And most of the hybrids for example as you asked about zebroids which includes the Zorse (Zebra and a horse), Zonkey (zebra and donkey), zoni (zebra and pony) ,mule (donkey and horse), or tigons (male tiger breeds with a female lion) and ligers (male lion bred with a female tiger) are not able to produce children with few exceptions. Cama (Camel bred with Lama) is an exception as they are fertile but because of size difference the only way to produce camas is artificial insemination. So, playing with natural processes is not easy and it always comes with other drawbacks. Scientists have really high hopes for the “transgenic” animals.
What I feel should be really discouraged are people doing experiments on animals to just see what they can get out of it or they think it would be funny to see strange specie. This only creates species with numerous abnormalities. Blood parrot cichlid, Puli or bubble eye goldfish are few examples that human beings have created without using their brain.
Crossbreeding is something which should not be done without knowledge or logic behind doing that. The science should be used for improvement and not for own preference.