The differentiation of sheep breed based on the body measurements

Abstract

This research was carried out to make a difference and to predict genetic distance some sheep that are genetically related to each other based on the body size measurements. Nineteen bodies size of 323 sheeps of five sheep breeds; namely Barbados Black Belly Cross (BC), Garut Local (GL), Garut Composite (GC), Sumatra Composite (SC) and St. Croix Cross (SCC) were measured. Analysis of variance and canonical discriminant analysis, Mahalanobis distance, plotting canonical and dendogram were performed using PROC GLM, PROC CANDISC, PROC CLUSTER and PROC TREE of SAS software ver. 9.0. Index Length, Width Slope, Depth Slope, Balance and Cumulative Index of GC sheep were significantly higher than the four other breeds. Canonical discriminant analysis successfully could differentiate among the five sheep breeds. All five breed were divided into two groups: The first group consisted of SCC, SC and BC; and the second group consisted of the GL and GC. The results of genetic distance estimation showed that the SCC had a value of sheep genetic distance closest to SC (10.83) and BC (27.98), while GL had the closest distance to GC (66.60). The tail width, horn base circumference, horn length (canonical 1) and variable length of the tail and body length (canonical 2) were the breed differentiation variable in this study.