• Question: can we genetically engineer horses to jump bigger ?

    Asked by anon-187168 to Stewart on 13 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Stewart Martin-Haugh

      Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      Good question! I don’t study genetics so I don’t know the answer for sure. I saw a good talk by Adam Rutherford a few years ago (he’s an expert on genetics) and he explained that even simple characteristics (e.g. skin colour) don’t have a single gene. His talks are really interesting – here’s a sample:

      How good a horse is at jumping depends on two things:

      1)Coordination/skill

      2)The force its muscles can exert on the ground

      You can improve your muscles through training, as can horses, but some of it depends on the quality of the muscles to start with (type of muscle fibre). That’s probably genetic, but it’s unlikely to just be a single gene. It could take many years to track down.

      You might have better luck trying to breed a high jumping dog: there’s already lots of variation in dog breeds, so you could pair off high jumping dogs from different breeds. This is genetic engineering as it’s been done for thousands of years.

      Finally, did you know there are rabbit jumping competitions?

Comments