Books by Margaret E. Derry

Animal breeding has been complicated by persisting factors across species, cultures, geography, and time. In Made to Order, Margaret E. Derry explains these factors and other breeding concerns in relation to both animals and society in North America and Europe over the past three centuries.Made to Order addresses how breeding methodology evolved, what characterized the aims of breeding, and the way structures were put in place to regulate the occupation. Illustrated by case studies on important farm animals and companion species, the book presents a synthetic overview of livestock breeding as a whole. It gives considerable emphasis to genetics and animal breeding in the post-1960 period, the relationship between environmental and improvement breeding, and regulation of breeding as seen through pedigrees. In doing so, Made to Order shows how studying the ancient human practice of animal breeding can illuminate the ways in which human thinking, theorizing, and evolving characterize our interactions with all-natural processes.

Derry's fascinating study is also a story of the evolution of animal medicine and humanitarian movements, and of international relations, particularly between Canada and the United States.

Margaret Derry examines the evolution of modern animal breeding from the invention of improved breeding methodologies in eighteenth-century England to the application of molecular genetics in the 1980s and 1990s.