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How to Calculate
Breed Percentage
or Bloodline Percentage
in Your Animal's Pedigree
• a tutorial •

This is a simple tutorial on how to calculate the blood percentage of one ancestor in your animal's pedigree. Or, how to calculate the blood percentage of one particular breed in a composite animal.

You have to fill in all the instances of one bloodline ancestor that appears in the animal's pedigree. Or, you have to fill in all the ancestors that are are the pure breed you are researching the percentage of. Here is a downloadable 6 generation blank form that you can open and use to fill in, if it goes back far enough. If not you can fill in one for each parent of your animal, and change the second generation (parents) to the 3rd generation (grandparents) and so on, to reflect the 2 stacked pedigrees as one animal's pedigree.

Remember, you have to be able to research the animal's pedigree far enough back ~ through enough generations ~ to reach all possible ancestors (instances of one particular ancestor for a bloodline), or, every individual that exists of the breed in question ~ in order to compute the accurate percentage of that breed or of that bloodline in your animal.

Here is a sample blank 7 generation pedigree
that illustrates this breakdown by each generation
(the 1st generation is the individual animal):

The pattern of one individual percentage (or individuals of 1 certain breed) in each generation (each generation is one column of the pedigree) is half the percentage value of the previous generation:

Formula Example: If your animal has the ancestor (or 100% pure animals of one breed) once in the 4th generation, once in the 5th generation, twice in the 7th generation, once in the 8th generation and four times in the 9th generation (you'd need a larger blank pedigree spreadsheet than the 7-generation illustration I have pictured above) your formula would be: 6.25 + 3.125 + (2 x .78125) + .390625 + (4 x .1953125) = 12.109375 ---- or ---- 12.11% of that bloodline or 12.11% of that breed.

below is a table of most fractions into percentages...

Pedigree Online: A free online pedigree generator, where you can plug in names (or breeds), and build an animal's pedigree, and compute the formula above. This particular webpage considers the parents to be the 1st generation. So, when you click on a 6 generation blank pedigree to fill in, you are filling in what we call here, a 7 generation pedigree. It doesn't really matter, as long as you compute the correct percentages for each generation column.

The individual animal itself is considered the first filial (F1) generation in genetics, and I use that designation, because that is how I learned it in genetics. One example is: a fullblood (100%) Dexter parent crossed with a pure (100%) Jersey parent, would produce an F1 Belfair calf. Then, when an F1 Belfair is bred to another F1 Belfair, their calf would be an F2 Belfair. In this way, F1 Belfairs, F2 Belfairs, F3 Belfairs, and so on, are all, 50% Dexter, and 50% Jersey, but the F4 Belfairs would be expected to be much more uniform in type and traits than F1 Belfairs would be.

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