Comparison of selection criteria for milk yield traits of Valle del Belice dairy sheep

The objectives of this work were to investigate alternative selection criteria for milk yield traits in the Valle del Belice sheep breed, which are either corrected for lactation length or not affected by lactation length, to estimate genetic parameters for these alternative selection criteria and to compare the estimated breeding values. The genetic correlations show that corrected milk yield (CMY), maximum test-day yield (MTY) and milk yield at hundred days (MYH), are moderately or weakly correlated with lactation length (LL) (rg = 0.58, 0.16 and 0.39, respectively). Higher genetic correlation was found between total milk yield (TMY) and LL (rg = 0.73). Rank correlations between selection criteria for estimated breeding values for the entire data set were above 0.90 for CMY vs. TMY and CMY vs. MYH and were similar for rams and ewes. Very low were the rank correlations for LL vs. MTY and LL vs. MYH in comparison with 0.75 for LL vs. TMY. Under high selection intensity, rank correlations between breeding values from CMY vs. TMY, CMY vs. MYH and MTY vs. MYH were lower, ranging from 0.53 to 0.75, but higher than all other contrasts between selection criteria. The general results obtained in this study show that MYH is a selection criterion that could improve the genetic evaluation in the Valle del Belice dairy sheep.