Empirical comparison of different estimate of heritability of herd life using related auxiliary traits in case of non-normal situations

Abstract

Survivability of a dairy animal is an important character in dairy cattle breeding which is influenced by production and auxiliary traits. After adjusting by production the true estimate of heritability of herd life (stayability) was obtained by different authors. Here production, i.e. auxiliary trait has significant effect on the estimates and their standard errors. There is more scope of obtaining true estimate by adjusting for production as well as other related auxiliary traits. The methods were studied for normal, lognormal and gamma distributions. Empirical comparisons are done among the estimates of different procedures and among the above said distributions.