Question: how do you think selective breeding could help animals from extinction

Kevin Arbuckle answered on 18 Mar 2014:

It depends on why an animal is going extinct. Two possibilities might be that if an animal can only live in a specific kind of habitat, and that is being destroyed, then if we can breed it to be able to live in other habitats then it might save it. Alternatively, if it is going extinct because of inbreeding depression (problems caused by breeding with relatives) then we could introduce some animals from elsewhere into the population to ‘selectively breed’ the population with new genes. This is called genetic rescue and has been done with adders for example.

That said, in most cases, evolution (which is really what selective breeding is) is probably too slow to combat many of the problems that animals face today – most of which are man-made dangers like habitat loss.