Beauty or Statistics: Practice and Science in Dutch Livestock Breeding, 1900–2000

Beauty or Statistics, by Bert Theunissen, is a valuable and innovative piece of scholarship based on meticulous research. It advances a broadening field devoted to understanding how animal breeding evolved in relation to the science of genetics, arguing that it is too simplistic to see the infiltration of genetics into practice as merely modernization. The book looks at the interface between science and practice in the breeding of farm animals, with a special focus on Dutch livestock breeding. The number of species dealt with is unusual, covering cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, and horses, and such wide coverage allows for the identification of trends outside the differing breeding cultures that can be found in livestock industries. The writing is clear and makes difficult subjects easy to understand.Historical animal breeding, and particularly its relationship to advancing science, has attracted two separate sets of academics: one principally interested in the cultural side of practical breeding as well as impinging social dynamics, and another that remains primarily concerned with the history of genetics in conjunction with its connections to practical animal breeding. There are few academics equally learned in both genetic and practical breeding methodology, a situation that weakens efforts at understanding how one set of strategies interacted with the other. Ignoring what constituted scientific breeding approaches undermines any arguments that might be made about why genetics impacted or did not impact practical breeding. Understanding the history of genetic methodology, but having no appreciation for what practical breeding methods entailed, does not lead to a particularly productive way of tackling the interface either. This book beautifully straddles the line between the two apparently diverse (and often divisive) attitudes to breeding, because of a deep understanding of both genetic and practical breeding methods. It gives concrete details, for example, as to how practical breeding could proceed successfully (and does proceed) with no input from genetics. At the same time, it explains the tactics underpinning the genetic approach and how these might interface with practical methods. The positions breeders and scientists held with respect to quantitative genetics and classical genetics (namely, hybrid breeding) are also discussed in light of developments within science and attitudes of breeders toward those developments. Because elucidation of the science/practice interface reaches a new level in this book, Beauty or Statistics takes the story of animal breeding to a more advanced stage.The introduction provides an elegant overview of breeding strategies as applied in both practical and scientific breeding, setting the intellectual background to the story. The author then gives a comprehensive outline of the book's content by reviewing issues addressed in the different chapters. The chapter on the breeding of dairy cattle by the Dutch introduces the idea that changes in breeding practices resulted from many factors. As the author states, “Cattle breeding was guided by an amalgam of considerations, as diverse as they were disputable, pertaining to practical experience, methods, scientific insights and technologies, ideas about responsible farming, aesthetic preferences, commercial interests, economic circumstances, and government policies” (62). The “beefing” up of black-and-white cattle after 1900, and the concurrent drop in milking capacity, led to extensive exportation in the 1950s to countries outside the United States and Canada. By the 1990s, however, Dutch herds of black-and-whites were again highly specialized for milk and had also become thoroughly “Holsteinized.” The chapter on Dutch chicken-breeding patterns shows that the trend in the Netherlands toward the hybrid breeding systems developed by geneticists, and the resulting corporate control of the breeding industry, were heavily influenced by the situation in the United States. When breeding became a separate globalized industry within an integrated system, Dutch breeder companies of egg-laying chicks retained an important position.Pig breeding in the Netherlands was similar to and yet different from chicken breeding. Pig breeding ended up being a strange blend of pure breeding, crossbreeding, and hybrid breeding. Private companies came into existence in order to practice hybrid breeding of boars, while the breed associations remained concerned with pure breeding or crossbreeding. The history of pig breeding in the Netherlands, the author states succinctly, illustrates “the inadequacy of the ‘art-to-science’ scenario as an explanation of how breeding became scientific” (117). The chapter on sheep breeding provides an interesting contrast to the “art-to-science” trends in the dairy cattle, chicken, and even pig worlds. As far as the breeding of Texel sheep was concerned, traditional methods not only trumped all efforts at introducing quantitative genetic strategies but also led to the production of superior sheep. The chapter on the Dutch Warmblood outlines how after 1960 farm and hobbyist breeders transformed an agricultural animal of different styles into a sport horse. While breeding the new Warmblood would ultimately involve a scientific reliance on data, and a move to quantitative genetic principles, by the time these trends took place the breeders had already remade the Warmblood into its modern version. In the end, Warmblood breeding reflected scientific standards and technology as well as traditional approaches to breeding.The conclusion provides overviews on breeding from a general and international point of view by using the Dutch example to show how science interacts with traditional breeding. In doing so, the author confirms that this book is more than a study of Dutch agriculture. It is a study of breeding in relation to traditional and scientific views.

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