Complexity of animal breeding choice making

The last decades of developments in animal breeding, genetics, genomics and data recording technologies have allowed the evaluation of larger numbers of animal and animal traits than ever before. This should help make animal breeding choices more informed, but it also makes them far more complex. This complexity may be overwhelming farmers, thus compromising realization of potential genetic gain in livestock industries. However, the effect of complexity of animal breeding choices on farmers’ selection of animals has received very little theoretical consideration to date. This paper reviews the theoretical principles of complex decisions, contextualizes the findings to the field of animal breeding, and analyses how farmers and the animal breeding industry are currently dealing with complexity. According to the findings of the analyses of complex decisions in other fields, the complexity of animal breeding choices is likely to lead to farmers using conscious or unconscious simplifying strategies (heuristics) to handle such complexity. When these heuristics are ineffective, poor selection decisions and a potential loss of genetic progress can be expected. Further, studies using survey experiments to understand farmer behaviour and selection preferences may be compromised by the complexity of the survey´s choice tasks. Thus, while many animal breeding industries recognize the complexity of animal breeding choices for farmers and attempts are made to assist farmers in their choice making, the effectiveness of these attempts is not well quantified and understood. We discuss three areas of research that could be key to disentangling how, and by how much, animal breeding choice complexity affects farmers’ decisions.