Currently, many threatened and endangered species are present in captivity. Their management is mostly focused on keeping the population viable (both demographically and genetically) and as similar to the wild ancestor populations as possible. To achieve these goals, captive populations are often managed in a breeding program with the highest priority. However, information on which the breeding program is based is often incomplete or missing. This causes breeding programs to make the, often incorrect, potentially dangerous assumption that founders are unrelated, which can lead to unintended inbreeding.
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