Body Weight is an Important Trait for Comparisons of Goat Breeds

Eleven goat breeds of different origin (10 Spanish and 1 African) were considered for this study: Zambian Dwarf, Azpi-Gorri, Blanca-Andaluza, Blanca-Celtibérica, Blanca de Rasquera, Catalana, Malagueña, Moncaína, Murciano-Granadina, Negra Serrana and Pyrenean. Nine linear body measurements for females, as well as the body weight ratio between gender and body weight, were obtained from literature and compared. Our results showed that the two principal components (PC) accounted for near 94% of total variation. The PC1 included the ratio between sexes, body weight and thoracic perimeter while the PC2 included body weight and ratio of body weight between sexes. Interestingly, all these high discriminating traits - body weight, body weight ratio between gender and thoracic perimeter- are related with body weight. The clustering of breeds according to those three traits offered a good picture of breeds according to their origin, with a cophenetic correlation, a measure of how faithfully a dendrogram preserved pairwise distances between the original unmodeled data points, high.