In order to begin a discussion on what the role of the purebred sector is in the beef industry - both in the present and the future - we must first define what the construct of a purebred is. The definition of a purebred is, according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, "an organism bred from members of a recognized breed, strain, or kind without admixture of other blood over many generations." To look at that another way, it could be stated as the artificial selection of individuals that exhibit certaincharacteristics in order to reduce the allelic frequency within that population so that a specific phenotype or trait is consistently expressed. This definition gives an explanation as to why purebred herds, originating in different parts of the world, express such a wide variation in their traits and phe-notypes from each other. The original breeders who created each breed had differing value structures of what the perfect beef animal consisted of. Some factors that may have influenced their decisionsare climate, geography, and resistance to region-specific pests or diseases.
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