Litter Planner / Speculative Breeding

[Rory-Reid]

Being able to use your data to actually plan future litters would be very useful to some breeders. There's two angles to approach this from:

• I know the rats I want in the family tree, what does that look like?
• I want to plan a litter but aren't sure who to go with. Let me set some constraints and go from there.

One breeder I spoke with handles this today using the breeding spreadsheet. They make use of the pedigree to match two parents together and visually examine the family tree - the inbreeding becomes quite easy to assess visually here, and you know what rats to dig into in order to work out genetics and health. Advanced use in this scenario - the breeder I spoke to would stub out theoretical rats to manipulate the family tree further up. E.G. I have the rats Alice, Bob, Cecil and Dhalia. I want to know what the offspring of "Alice X Bob" and "Cecil X Dhalia" looks like.

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I think breeders shouldn't be manipulating the data to get what they want out of a system, thoguh I appreciate it is lightweight and useful to do so in the spreadsheet today. Basemix should have a bespoke feature for this sort of thing - perhaps allowing you to pick rats, pick their family tree position, and then interpret from there. This means basemix should be capable of inferring multiple theoretical rats in order to build a big picture. When any picture is built, not only can we show the family tree, but we could maybe even calculate statistics on inbreeding and show a total health chart of the family tree, average age, so on and so forth.

The other flow is my own guesswork, where you want to set constraints. I imagine this would look like a pedigree control and more like a form where you pick values, things you desire or want to select for etc. Maybe this is more reliant on other data being in the system, but it's something to bare in mind.