Abstract

Principles for dairy sire evaluation have been put forward for millenia. At the start of planned improvement in the last century, the belonging to a herd-book or some coat patterns were assumed to consitute evidence of quality. The body conformation and pedigree information were used for sire evaluation, followed by the various systems of progeny testing: first dam-daughter comparisons, next contemporary comparisons and now comparisons to a genetic base level. Each selection criterion apparently was effective for some time increasing uniformity and making it necessary to refine the methods and to define new principles. In the following, some principles for evaluating dairy sires will be discussed, which at present warrant attention

R. Bar-Anan

Proceedings of the World Congress on Genetics Applied to Livestock Production, Volume 1, Madrid, Spain, 579–584, 1974