70 SWINE IN AMERICA 



and discrimination are necessary. Indiscriminate in- 

 breeding is reprehensible in the extreme, and should be 

 preached against in season and out of season, but judi- 

 cious inbreeding has made possible the superior intli- 

 viduals, families and l)reeds now so common in all im- 

 proved animal husbandry. Inbreeding in itself is not to 

 be inveighed against so much as the mating of animals 

 liable to reproduce undesirable qualities. A summing 

 up, in a sentence, of what the experience of the years 

 has demonstrated as to inbreeding would be this : Super- 

 vised by an artist, inbreeding is admirable; in the 

 hands of a bungler, it may be worse than bad. 



N. H. Gentry of Missouri, known everywhere as one 

 of the most successful swine improvers and breeders in 

 any country, says : "My experience in inbreeding is 

 that by it we intensify what we have, let it be good or 

 bad, let it be weak or strong in constitution. The theory 

 advanced by the mass of people, to the efifect that we 

 diminish size and weaken constitution, is all wrong unless 

 the strain we are inbreeding lacks size as a rule, or lacks 

 constitution. Animals with plenty of size and a vigorous 

 constitution can have these traits intensified as certainly 

 as we can lessen them by inbreeding with strains lacking 

 these essential traits. If we can intensify the one it 

 seems ti:) me as reasonable that we can the other; so a 

 man's success in inbreeding will depend upon what he has 

 to inbreed with. Rightly and intelligently done, I have 

 never been alile to detect any bad results whatever from 

 inbreeding. It has always been strange to me that almost 

 every person who has never given the subject any study 



