Using Morphological Traits to Predict Body Weight of Dorper Sheep Lambs

Abstract

The Dorper sheep are known to be a fast-growing breed with a very good body conformation that produces high-quality carcass. The recent study was conducted to determine the relationship between body weight (BW) and morphological traits, such as heart girth (HG), rump height (RH), body length (BL), withers height (WH), and sternum height (SH). A total of 51 Dorper sheep lambs (29 female and 22 male lambs) were used as experimental animals. The data was collected 24 hours after birth. Data were analyzed using Pearson’s correlation and simple regression to attain the objectives. The obtained results indicated that BW had a positively high statistically correlation with HG (r = 0.81), RH (r = 0.766), BL (r = 0.893), WH (r = 0.874), and SH (r = 0.618) in female Dorper sheep lambs. Furthermore, results showed that BW had a positively high statistically significant association with HG (r = 0.886), RH (r = 0.590), BL (r = 0.900), WH (r = 0.613), and SH (r = 0.707) in male Dorper sheep lambs. Simple regression models for morphological traits indicated that BL had the highest coefficient of determination (R2 = 0.80) and the lowest mean square error (MSE = 2.83) in female Dorper sheep lambs, and also the highest coefficient of determination (R2 = 0.81) and mean square error (MSE = 1.07) in male Dorper sheep lambs. In conclusion, the findings indicated that improving HG, RH, BL, WH, and SH might result in the enhancement of BW in Dorper sheep lambs. Simple regression results suggested that BL could be selected as a facilitating factor in the breeding programs to improve the BW of Dorper sheep lambs at birth.