Analysis of growth traits in Rambouillet sheep by using descriptive statistics

Abstract

Performance data on 13717 animals were collected from history sheets of Rambouillet sheep maintained at Government Sheep Breeding and Research Farm, Reasi, Jammu, India. The present study was conducted with the objective to find the data distribution and correlations between different growth traits. Growth traits included in the present study were birth weight (BW), weaning weight (WW), nine-month body weight (NW) and twelve-month body weight or yearling weight (YW). The overall averages were 3.34±0.01 kg, 15.71±0.04 kg, 22.75±0.04 kg and 27.38±0.04 kg, respectively for BW, WW, NW and YW. Sex had significant effect on all the growth traits of the present study. The co-efficient of variation (CV) (%) ranged from 15.69% for YW to 29.52% for WW. The CV among traits under study were low to moderate indicate that the traits had low to moderate variability. Kurtosis values for raw data showed that the data for different growth traits were under platykurtic distribution. The product moment correlations between different growth traits were positive and were highly significant (p<0.01) except for BW & NW. It can be concluded from the present study that sex plays important role in body weight traits and body weight traits are highly correlated to each others.