Free Sample
The Complete Guide to Becoming An Animal Breeder
The real pay, daily grind, and career path - so you can decide if breeding animals is your future before you invest a dime of tuition or a decade of your life
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: What Does a Animal Breeder Actually Do?
Let's start with what you probably think an animal breeder does, because in your head it's probably something like this: you spend your days in a sunny pasture or a clean, well-lit kennel, surrounded by healthy animals in all stages of life. You watch a new litter take its first wobbly steps. You hold a wriggling puppy or bottle-feed a newborn lamb. It's heartwarming, and it's a tiny fraction of the job.
The other 95 percent of the job is management, observation, physical labor, and data entry. If you're considering this career, you need to understand that animal breeding is not a lifestyle job spent cuddling babies. It's a production job with a biological twist, and the animals are both your product and your coworkers. The ones who succeed treat it that way.
The core responsibilities
At its most basic level, an animal breeder's job is to manage the reproduction of animals for a specific purpose: producing livestock for meat, milk, or wool; breeding working animals like herding dogs or draft horses; preserving rare or endangered genetics; or supplying companion animals to the pet market. Whatever the species or the end goal, the daily work funnels into four main areas: monitoring reproductive cycles, managing breeding, caring for pregnant and newborn animals, and keeping meticulous records.
Monitoring reproductive cycles is where the job actually starts. You need to know when each female is ready to breed, which means you'll learn to read