ABSTRACT
Once upon a time, there was a man named Robert Bakewell (1725–95), who lived on a large farm called Dishley Grange in Leicestershire, admired by his neighbors, respected by his employees, and beloved by his animals, to whom he was unusually kind. He never married, but devoted himself entirely to livestock husbandry. As a result of years of selfless and patriotic dedication, he presented to his countrymen, who demanded increasing quantities of fresh meat as a result of their burgeoning population and intermittent wars with the French, improved strains of the most important domestic species – more succulent sheep and cattle, larger cart-horses, and pigs which his friends, at least, described as “superior.” 1 One of these improved strains, the New Leicester or Dishley sheep, appeared to be of such transcendent merit that it dominated British sheep-breeding for decades. The production of these distinguished creatures was not the result of lucky accident, nor even of the instinctive application of craft expertise, although Bakewell had plenty of that. More important, however, were his general ideas about how to select superior animals and then pair them so as to ensure that their desirable qualities would predictably re-emerge in their offspring and more remote descendants. Based on repeated inbreeding, Bakewell’s method had still greater impact on his fellow agriculturalists than did the animals who exemplified it; together, his precepts and his example laid the foundation for the British pre-eminence in stock-breeding that lasted through the nineteenth century.
