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. 2023 Apr 17;13(8):1374.
doi: 10.3390/ani13081374.

Estimates of Genetic Parameters for Milk, the Occurrence of and Susceptibility to Clinical Lameness and Claw Disorders in Dairy Goats

Natasha Jaques  1 , Sally-Anne Turner  2 , Emilie Vallée  3 , Cord Heuer  3 , Nicolas Lopez-Villalobos  1
Affiliations

Estimates of Genetic Parameters for Milk, the Occurrence of and Susceptibility to Clinical Lameness and Claw Disorders in Dairy Goats

Natasha Jaques et al. Animals (Basel). .

Abstract

The New Zealand goat industry accesses niche markets for high-value products, mainly formula for infants and young children. This study aimed to estimate the genetic parameters of occurrence and susceptibility of clinical lameness and selected claw disorders and establish their genetic associations with milk production traits. Information on pedigree, lameness, claw disorders, and milk production was collected on three farms between June 2019 and July 2020. The dataset contained 1637 does from 174 sires and 1231 dams. Estimates of genetic and residual (co)variances, heritabilities, and genetic and phenotypic correlations were obtained with uni- and bi-variate animal models. The models included the fixed effects of farm and parity, deviation from the median kidding date as a covariate, and the random effects of animal and residual error. The heritability (h2) estimates for lameness occurrence and susceptibility were 0.07 and 0.13, respectively. The h2 estimates for claw disorder susceptibilities ranged from 0.02 to 0.23. The genotypic correlations ranged from weak to very strong between lameness and milk production traits (-0.94 to 0.84) and weak to moderate (0.23 to 0.84) between claw disorder and milk production traits.

Keywords: claw disorder; genetic correlation; genetic evaluation; goat; heritability; lameness; milk production; occurrence; susceptibility.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest. However, one of the authors, Sally-Anne Turner, from the Dairy Goat Co-Operative (NZ) Ltd., was involved in the design and collection of data of this study, as well as supervision of the PhD student, however, was not involved in the analyses or interpretation of data and in the original writing of the manuscript.

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