Half siblings?

raeleigh26

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I've never had pigs. .. that said, I know that all the research and advice in the world doesn't compare to actually having experience with any particular animal, but. .. I want pigs. .. and they'll be pastured spring to fall and penned in the garden over winter, I only intend to have 2 sows and 1 boar, .... getting to my question, my sister will be giving me piglets to start with in the spring, they'll be half siblings, can I breed them that closely related? Or shall I take 2 females and buy a boar from someone else? (They're blue butt, I'd hoped to go with Hampshire, but that's what we've got)
Also, any advice for starting it would be welcome, and thank you!
 

Latestarter

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There are a number of threads in the pig section that might help you out. I've never owned pigs, but from what I've read, you can breed siblings as long as the offspring are for slaughter... But if you can get a boar from elsewhere, then you could avoid the issues altogether...
 

misfitmorgan

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Latestarter is exactly right if your just making meat pigs you can breed siblings. If your wanting to breed pigs and retain gilts to bred back its not a good practice. Generally you want un-related pigs or mostly unrelated pigs for foundation stock and if you plan to save back boars/gilts you need another unrelated pig to bred to them. If you follow that system you can then bred offspring from those unrelated sets of kids and then switch out your boars and keep going. i'm not sure that makes a lot of sense so here it is broken down.

G represents gilt B represents boar ?? represents new unrelated boar
This example assumes the b1 and b2 are not related to each other or the gilts they are breeding.

g1 , g2 X b1 = 2g1, 2g2, 2b1
g3,g4 X b2 = 2g3, 2g4, 2b2

2g1, 2g2 X 2b2 = 3g1, 3g2
2g3, 2g4, X 2b1 = 3g3, 3g4

3g1, 3g2 X ??
3g3, 3g4 X ??

If you follow this sort of pattern you will only need a new boar/s every 2-3yrs or you can bred out your old sows(g1-g4) while selling their piglets and only replace them after their production goes down . Really many ways to bred pigs you just have to figure out what your goals are. If you want to raise meat pigs sibling X sibling is fine. If you want to raise 4h pigs not so good because 100% of 4h pigs are not always slaughtered though i would say probly 90% are. If you want to sell pigs as breeders you dont want to breed siblings at all, we also dont line breed closer then two gens EX. Granddad to granddaughter.
 
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Bossroo

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Not necessarily true !!! If one culls the offspring ruthlessly to select for desired characteristics and to eliminate undesired characteristics , then there will be very little if any issues. How do you think that purebred animals are so uniform in appearance come from. Consider the Morgan Horses ... every one of that breed of horse decends from just ONE original stallion ... Justin Morgan. So all of the animals in this breed have him MULTIPLE times in their pedigree. :caf
 

raeleigh26

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Line breeding, the goal is to have no more than 50% DNA from any one parent or grand parent, I'm looking into developing the same technique with my cattle.
Not a lot of info online though.
 

misfitmorgan

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Technically yes you can keep an inbred herd of anything but the question was about breeding siblings and if it is generally a good idea. Generally no it is not, if you have one animal with certain traits you want you have to inbreed yes but unless your trying to make a "new" breed or have some super awesome trait why would you bother? Cull rate on inbred genetics after so many successive generations being bred back is something like 80%. So your making 80% garbage, if you have no goal in mind that would not only be a bad business practice, it would also be unwise. As animals become more and more inbred rate of infertility and birth defects go up and litter size goes down. On top of that unless you are raising/selling purely butcher animals people will not want to buy your garbage after a certain point. No one wants a piglet with a high rate of infertility, birth defects or small let size. So to sum it up technically yes you can breed them as much as you want but it's not good animal husbandry and without a really good reason or something to be gained there is no point too.
 

raeleigh26

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I agree, with pigs, I only want to breed once a year to have a pig to butcher for everyone (I have a huge family) so none of the offspring would ever be sold or bred, is a mute point right now anyway, because I've found another breeder to get one from.
With my cows, I've got 4 cows and 2 bulls, crossing dexter and jersey, there's a point to it and micro managing genetics is imperative, but that's a different story.
 

misfitmorgan

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Starting with a good base such as unrelated 4 cows and two bulls is pretty good...much more genetically diverse then 1 and 1. Anyhow glad you got the pigs sorted out.
 

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