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Heritability of mastitis and lameness in dairy cows using threshold models

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2017

R.H Pirzada
Affiliation:
Livestock Department, Sindh Pakistan, 2 SAFS, UWB LL57 2UW
I. ApDewi
Affiliation:
School of Agricultural and Forest Sciences University of Wales, Bangor, Gwynedd, LL57 2UW
J.B. Owen
Affiliation:
School of Agricultural and Forest Sciences University of Wales, Bangor, Gwynedd, LL57 2UW
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Extract

Improvements in management (including health care, preventative strategies and housing design) are one way to decrease the incidence of diseases. However, susceptibility to diseases is heritable and there is interest in selection for disease resitance. Genetic parameters of diseases, such as mastitis and lameness, are required so that these traits can be included in selection programmes. Phenotypes for mastitis and lameness are not expressed on a continuous scale and Gianola (1982) suggested that threshold models are more suitable for such binary traits. Whilst threshold models have been reported as appropriate for the analysis of binary traits they demand more time and greater computing power (Kadarmideen et al., 2000). The objectives of the current analyses were to estimate heritability and repeatability of mastitis and lameness where these traits were treated as binary traits, and to compare the estimates to those obtained in analyses that assumed the traits were continuous (i.e. that ignored the fact that they were “all or nothing” traits).

Type
Poster Presentations
Copyright
Copyright © The British Society of Animal Science 2002

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References

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