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Turkish Journal of Veterinary & Animal Sciences

DOI

10.3906/vet-2010-15

Abstract

We assumed that live body weight (LBW) would be useful to be utilized as informative categorical variable in differentiation goat performance towards better assignment into breeds. One-day old goat kids of both sexes were separately allocated as 3 breeds: Baladi, crossbreds and Shami. The kid LBW was recorded weekly until the 12th week of age. Weekly LBW showed a significant increase (p < 0.05) for both males and females of the 3 breeds and highly significant (p < 0.0001) between breeds. The high phenotypic correlation between most of the studied measurements encouraged us to investigate their efficiency in breed differentiation at early life age. Results showed that only LBW of the week 1, 2, 5, 9, and 11, and week 1, 2, 3, 11, and 12 were efficient in discriminating male and female kids, respectively. These results were better presented by showing significant genetic distances (p < 0.0001) between the breeds using the Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic mean (UPGMA) dendrogram. It is inferred that the phylogenetic tree lengths of the three breeds were 29.02 and 222.13 for male and female kids, respectively. Baladi and crossbred kids of both sexes grouped into one cluster closer than Shami kids. The canonical discriminant analysis was proved its successfulness for identifying breed based on LBW measurement.

Keywords

Growth physiology, multivariate discriminant analysis, crossbreeding, welfare

First Page

492

Last Page

500

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