#btw this is also why I get prickley when people accuse me of being too city

[doberbutts]

love your posts so much!!

when i was younger (middle school) I wanted to breed huskies and learn all about dog breeds but I never even thought about/ considered some of the things you post about. it's super interesting! : )

I took Animal Biotech in High School as a free science period (since I'd completed my science requirements to graduate within the first 1.5 years of high school) and I think it was one of the best decisions I've ever made with my education. Most of it, yes, was How To Be A Farmer, which tracks since I went to a tinyass Mennonite schoolhouse for most of my schooling, but some of it was genuinely interesting.

If X pig breed needs Y amount of food to gain Z pounds but produces ABC amount of waste, vs a different pig breed needing a different amount of food to gain a different weight while producing a different amount of waste, you have this many dollars and that big of property and can only keep so many pigs, these pigs cost this much as piglets and sell for that much per pound at slaughter, etc etc those were the types of things we had to research and, occasionally, experiment with on our school's small farm.

I remember another experiment where we measured bones of horses of known origin and working conditions to draw conclusions of what the ideal horse would look like and what breed or breeds to use in order to create that horse for our specific [imaginary] farm setups. I remember one talking about the height and length of a cow's birth canal and how it determines how much assistance she may need with calving. I remember a discussion on goat hooves vs sheep hooves and how it contributed to containment methods.

Truly if I could think of a profession that would allow me to continue research in this manner, I think that would be my dream job. Sadly when I look up "animal biotechnology" a lot of it is animal experimentation in labratories, which I am very uninterested in. I don't really know what to call it other than what my school called it, but that was one of my favorite classes and I took it on a whim because it had "bio" and "animal" in it so I assumed it would be passably interesting.