They are genetically engineering the American Chestnut...

[Lydia Leftcoast]

52. Crossbreeding is not the same as Genetic Engineering!

If you cross a poodle and a lab to get a labradoodle, that's not genetic engineering. That's cross-breeding, and it's as old as agriculture. All mules, for example, are the result of cross-breeding a horse and a donkey, since mules are almost always sterile and can't have their own baby mules.

You might even find two animals or plants that have the same trait and breed them to each other to ensure the continuation of that trait, but that's still not genetic engineering. That's selective breeding. For example, the hairless cat breeds were created by finding cats who had the same hairless mutation and breeding them to one another until all the offspring had that trait.

But cross-breeding always occurs among closely related species. You might cross-breed two varieties of dog, but you wouldn't cross-breed a dog and a cat. It wouldn't work, not even if you tried to produce a litter of puppy-kittens with normal egg and sperm in a test-tube.

It would be genetic engineering if someone inserted the genes from one species into the genes of an entirely unrelated species in the lab.