A total of 1,367 first lactation records of daughters of 81 sires, having 5 or more progeny were used to evaluate sires by 3 different methods viz., least squares (LS), best linear unbiased prediction (BLUP) and derivative free restricted maximum likelihood (DFREML) method. The highest and lowest overall average breeding value of sires for first lactation 305 days or less milk yield was obtaine...

Binary variables arising from an underlying normal distribution with a fixed threshold were simulated in a two-stage selection scheme with a sire model. The model had herd-year-seasons and groups as fixed effects and sires as random variables; a heritability of .25 was used in the simulation. The "best" 20% of the sires were allowed to have additional progeny in the second stage. The criteria u...

The effects of heterogeneity of variance among herds on dairy sire evaluation were examined. Data consisted of 111,196 first lactation Holstein production records of heifers calving in Ontario between 1978 and 1983. To account for selection, older sires without first crop daughters in the data were treated as fixed effects. Herds were classified into one of nine groups based on their estimated ...

Recently, doubt has been cast on studies supporting good genes sexual selection by the suggestion that observed genetic benefits for offspring may be confounded by differential maternal allocation. In traditional analyses, observed genetic sire effects on offspring phenotype may result from females allocating more resources to the offspring of attractive males. However, maternal effects such as...

One hundred sixteen spring-calving Polled Hereford x Angus cows were milked using milking machines after receiving 20 IU of oxytocin. Sires of the cows had been divergently selected on yearling weight (YW) and total maternal (MAT) EPD to form four groups: high YW, high MAT EPD; high YW, low MAT EPD; low YW, high MAT EPD; and low YW, low MAT EPD. Average milk production after 12-h calf separatio...

Sire genetic evaluations for protein yield, productive life, and selected type traits from the US were correlated with sire evaluations for disease from Denmark and Sweden and were then adjusted to approximate genetic correlations. Disease categories from Denmark included reproductive diseases, foot and leg diseases, metabolic and digestive diseases, and all diseases other than mastitis. Geneti...

SUMMARY Lactation milk and fat records of 6,949 daughters, 6,201 different dams, and the contemporary D.H.I.A. herd averages of 2,420 herds were studied, to compare five measures of a dairy site's transmitting ability. They were the daughter average, daughter-dam difference, equal-parent index, daughter-contemporary herd difference, and daughter-contemporary-herd index. The daughters and dams w...

The objective of this study was to describe the production systems in countries that participate in international dairy sire evaluations, and to identify factors that cause variation in progeny performance between herds. Test day data from first lactation Holstein cows in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New...

Deoxyribonucleic acid-based tests were used to assign paternity to 625 calves from a multiple-sire breeding pasture. There was a large variability in calf output and a large proportion of young bulls that did not sire any offspring. Five of 27 herd sires produced over 50% of the calves, whereas 10 sires produced no progeny and 9 of these were yearling bulls. A comparison was made between the pa...

average age distribution and generation interval were investigated in four different selection pathways. i.e., sire of future sires (ss), sire of future dams (sd), dam of future sires (ds) and dam of future dams (dd). young bulls pathway (yb) is also considered as a path that affects the generation interval in sd pathway when using progeny testing program. data were collected from animal breedi...