What is Hybrid Vigour ?
The term Hybrid Vigour has been used extensively in all forms of breeding. Whether you are breeding Plants or animals the term is used considerably in breeding jargon.
What is Hybrid Vigour?
The simple answer to this question is that it is out crossing or crossbreeding. When choosing a stallion to breed to your mare you have a variety choices. You can choose to breed your mare to a Stallion with similar bloodlines – Linebreeding or Inbreeding. Breed your mare to a Stallion of a totally different breed – Crossbreeding. The other choice is to choose a Stallion of the same breed that does not share any direct descendants with your mare. This is out crossing. Out crossing and Crossbreeding are said to ad Hybrid Vigour to the offspring.
Everyone wants to improve on their horses every generation. With Out Crossing and Crossbreeding you can achieve this by crossing your mare with a stallion that will can improve on what good traits your mare has. This could be in many areas such as, performance, confirmation, soundness or speed, just to name a few. So if you have produced a foal that has improved on its parents then you have added hybrid vigour to your stable.
It increases the Genepool.
One of the problems with Line Breeding is that you are using a small section of the available gene pool to breed your horses. Not only can this increase the chances of passing on bad genes to the next generation, it also ends up limiting the variety of genes out there to breed with. There are also instances where Linebreeding has gone as far as it can regarding improving the breed. Out crossing not only enables more variety available within the gene pool, but it can also give those line bred horses an extra boost.
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