Development of a Genetic Evaluation in Austrian Dairy Sheep

Abstract Text: In order to establish a routine genetic evaluation, lactation and test-day records of two dairy sheep breeds (East Friesian, Lacaune) were analyzed. Genetic parameters were estimated for production traits (milk, fat and protein yield, fat and protein percentage) and somatic cell count (SCC). Estimated heritabilities for production traits are moderate to high while those for SCC transformed to somatic cell score are below 0.10. Generally, heritability estimates were higher for the lactation model compared to the test-day model and for Lacaune compared to East Friesian, respectively. Results indicated that partial lactations should be treated as different traits for the first lactation (days 1-100 and 101-240) while 2^ndand higher lactations may be evaluated by a repeatability model. For SCC, a fixed regression test-day model is appropriate.

Keywords:

Dairy sheep

Genetic analysis

Milk production traits