Eldin Leighton, PhD (pt 1): The Science of Animal Breeding

Eldin Leighton has a PhD in animal breeding and has wound up a long career managing the breeding program at The Seeing Eye, which is the largest guide dog organization in the US. In this episode, Eldin talks to us about how he got where he is now and gets super nerdy about the ins and outs of selecting breeding animals for the traits you want, from cattle to seeing eye dogs. (We love nerdy.) Eldin had so much good information that this ended up being two episodes, so stay tuned for part two next week.

The papers Eldin mentions in this episode are:

Leighton, Eldin A., et al. "Genetic improvement of hip-extended scores in 3 breeds of guide dogs using estimated breeding values: Notable progress but more improvement is needed." PloS one 14.2 (2019): e0212544. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0212544

Kealy, Richard D., et al. "Evaluation of the effect of limited food consumption on radiographic evidence of osteoarthritis in dogs." Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 217.11 (2000): 1678-1680. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.204.1848&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Find this episode's transcript here.