Abstract
The effects of breed, sire and environmental factors on the birth and weaning weight of lambs The aim of this study was to determine the effect of some important factors influencing on the birth and weaning weight variability in lambs. Data from 2603 ewes was included in the analysis, where 3961 lambs were obtained during the five years of the research. Data was tested using analysis of variance (ANOVA) with the GLM procedure of Minitab Release 13.1. Our results presented significant influence on the year of lambing, breed, ram genotype, age of a dam, type of a birth (litter size), sex of a lamb and on the birth weight and weaning weight of lambs. Keywords: birth and weaning weight of lambs; ram genotype; year of lambing; age of ewes; litter size (type of birth); sex of a lamb; the Ascanian fine-fleece breed.
Highlights
Our results presented a significant influence of the lambing year, breed, sire genotype, age of a dam, type of a birth and sex of a lamb on the birth weight and weaning weight of lambs which is in a good agreement with the results obtained by other authors
This was in the agreement with observations by Assan & Makuza [4] that year of lambing had significant effect (p < 0.05) on birth weight in indigenous the Sabi, the Mutton Merino and the Dorper sheep
The effect of birth status was nonsignificant in the Dorper and Mutton Merino sheep while effect of birth status was significant on birth weight in indigenous the Sabi sheep [4]
Summary
The aim of this study was to determine the effect of some important factors influencing on the birth and weaning weight variability in lambs. Single-born crossbred lambs had higher weight at birth, of some important factors influencing the birth and weaning weight as compared to twins
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