Crossing, grading, and keeping pure: animal breeding and exchange around 1860

During the first half of the nineteenth century, breeders of livestock in the United States and Germany began to approach animal husbandry in a more systematic manner. Responding to changes in ideas about heredity and economic pressures, they imported large numbers of animals from abroad, especially from Great Britain. With these imported breeds they set out to transform their native specimens to better meet the needs of an industrializing nation. Their strategies for animal improvement, which included grading, crossing, and pure breeding, constituted practical experiments into heredity that ran parallel to the work of naturalists. By 1860, the modern system of breeding, with its attention to public registries of pedigrees, gained increasing influence in both contexts.