Inbreeding is the mating of individuals that are related. In the strict sense, all members of a breed are related. As a result, any seedstock producer is practicing some inbreeding. Therefore, we generally reserve the term inbreeding for the mating of animals that are more closely related than the average of the breed.
Most breeds of livestock went through a phase of inbreeding early in their development. This resulted from the need to establish color patterns and other aspects of physical appearance. Since one of the results of inbreeding is to establish more genetic uniformity, those traits that have simple means of
inheritance can be fixed more easily with the aid of inbreeding.