Robert Bakewell and the Science of Cattle Breeding: Della’s Christmas Gift

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Robert Bakewell and the Science of Cattle Breeding: Della’s Christmas Gift

While I’m a farmer’s daughter, my family were strictly crop farmers; we never had livestock. My maternal grandfather did, though, and both of my parents grew up milking cows. But I learned all I know about cattle breeding from Wikipedia and other online sources.

In the mid-18th century, two British agriculturalists, Robert Bakewell and Thomas Coke, introduced selective breeding as a scientific practice and used inbreeding to stabilize certain qualities in order to reduce genetic diversity. Bakewell was also the first to breed cattle to be used primarily for beef. Arguably, his most important breeding program was with sheep.

Robert Bakewell

In fact…

There really was a Thomas Paget family who worked with the innovative methods of Robert Bakewell (the elder Thomas in my story was a second cousin of Bakewell) in the Leicester vicinity, and the family really did give up farming for banking. Della’s older brother Thomas (who wasn’t suited for farming in the story) founded the Bank of Paget and Kirby (although I fudged the dates a bit). He became MP for Leicestershire in 1831 and was Mayor of Leicester in 1836-7.

Other than that, the story is entirely my own (LOL). It’s odd how certain things take hold of my imagination and drive me to create a story.

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