Animal Ancestry

OK I’m not suggesting anyone is descended from animals, that would be impossible although I’m sure me and my guinea pig were siblings as we were so alike in personality.

Grandpa and my Piggy

Let me explain where this rambling came from. One day while watching the ferry come in at Goodwick my Dad asked can you do a family tree from a dog.

My Grandparents had an ex show dog who was registered with the kennel club. Her full name was Bonnie Ruff Candy Tuff and she was a miniature Shetland sheepdog.

Bonnie Ruff Candy Tuff having a bath

This is all I know about Candy. But who were her parents and grandparents? This took me to the Kennel Clubs website to search for her, but it seems they on only have current dogs registered on the internet so I drew a blank straight away. I tried to search for my cousins dog, an Alaskan Malamute who won junior Crufts before they got him, but again I could find nothing on the Kennel Clubs site (I do know more about him for when he joined the family).

So where did this leave my musings? Well no where, but it did get me thinking wouldn’t it be great if you could find this out and create a family tree for your pet.  Just image the tree on the wall with photos of the pet’s ancestors. How cute would that be! If you think about it how cool would it be to know about your pet’s family. Would there be similarities in personality and looks. In the case of my guinea pig did they have eye sight problems and have the favourite past times of eating dandelions (I've tried grass and it's OK) , hiding, snuggles and sleeping?

Now from here my internal ramblings got out of hand and got thinking about the animal world. Take for example the Eurasian Blue Tit. They have around 8 eggs at a time and up to 4 broods a year. If they all survive a pair of birds will have 32 children per year (8x4). The following year if all the children have children by the end of the year then the original pair will have 1024 grandchildren (32x32) and by year 3 they would have 32768 great grandchildren (1024x32). That’s just mind blowing. So in 3 years from one original couple 33824 new tweety birds can enter the world. So even if just 30% which is the average survive, that’s 10147 new lives! It’s a good job their only small, if they were the size of dinosaurs we’d be over run!

Can you imagine how big their family tree would be? You’d never get it on the wall of a house, let alone a nest wall. It would go round the tree the nest was in hundreds of times (and if it included photos, they’d all look the same pretty much). To put this into perspective, my family tree goes back to my 10 time great grandparents and has 4649 people in it (this includes extended family). If you print it out on A4 paper with just my direct ancestors on it it would cover 30 sheet of paper. I can even begin to fathom how big the Blue tits chart would be. Also can you imagine if they had to choose names for all of them? My ancestors Lady Elizabeth and Sir Thomas Wardle only had 14 children and most of their birth certificates say male or female Wardle as they hadn’t come up with names by the 42 day deadline for registering births!

So back to my original thoughts can you trace the family tree of an animal, I would have to say you could if you had known the animals ancestors, so for example had a long line of animals all descended from one another, then you could form a tree but it could be complicated as you may only have information on one line, but even this would be interesting. So calling all animal owners who have pets from a specific line, why not do a family tree for your pet!