Prediction of Body Weight from Linear Body Measurements for Horro Sheep Breeds in Oromia, Ethiopia

Dereje Bekele,Tesfaye Tadesse

doi:10.11648/j.ijgg.20210903.13

Dereje Bekele, Tesfaye Tadesse

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijgg.20210903.13

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Abstract

The study was carried out in Bako Agricultural Research Center’s sheep farm and Horro district to determine the relationship between live weight and linear measurements and predict live weight from morphometric traits and morphometric measurements from 1589 Horro sheep (1131 female and 456 male) were used to determine relationships between body weight and linear body measurements. Accordingly, Body weight, Body length, Height at wither, Chest girth, Chest width, Rump length and Pelvic width measurements were recorded for each animal. Correlation and regression analysis between body weight and the linear body measurements were conducted independently for male and female within the different age categories defined using dentition. In most of the analyses, there was a significantly (p<0.001) higher correlation between body weight and the linear body measurements. Chest girth has showed the most higher and consistent correlation with body weight in both sex and the different age categories. Based on the correlation results chest girth was primarily used to fit the equation for prediction of body weight in stepwise regression. Thus, the general equations developed from the regression analyses were based only on sex rather than for different age categories. As a result the equations BW= -24.24 + 0.68CG for male Horro sheep, and BW= -29.03 + 0.75CG for female Horro sheep can accurately predict body weight of the breed at any age.

Highlights

Sheep meat production is indispensable to meet protein needs of people throughout the world
Higher correlation coefficients were observed for chest girth, body length, and height at wither with r2 values of 0.87, 0.82, and 0.79 for males and 0.80, 0.77 and 0.73 for females, respectively
Among the three measurements chest girth has showed the highest correlation coefficient for both male (0.87) and female (0.80). This shows that body weight can be better predicted from chest girth than the other measurements

Summary

Introduction

Sheep meat production is indispensable to meet protein needs of people throughout the world. Information on body weight with several body measurements is necessary to monitor the growth of the sheep and to estimate genetic correlations between body weight and body measurements. Body weight is often the most common and informative measure of animal performance [2]. In order to develop a very good model for genetic improvement of sheep, it is important to measure traits such as live weight with some level of accuracy. Body weights of animals are usually measured using weighing scale. Proper measure of this trait is often difficult under on-farm conditions basically due to unavailability and cost of weighing scale. The best method of weighing animals without scale is to regress body weight on certain linear measurements which can be measurable and interpretable [1]

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Conclusion