Undesired Phenotypic and Genetic Trend for Stillbirth in Danish Holsteins

Abstract

The primary aim of this study was to evaluate the phenotypic and genetic trends for stillbirth in Danish Holsteins. Trends of calving difficulty and calf size were also evaluated. The second aim was to compare predicted transmitting abilities (PTA) of sires for stillbirth using a linear and a threshold model. Direct and maternal genetic effects were modeled by fitting correlated additive genetic effects of the sire and the maternal grandsire (MGS). For both the calf and the dam, covariates of breed proportions of Holstein-Friesian (HF) and the heterozygosity between HF and the original Danish Black and White (ODBW) were included. Records from 1.8 million first-calving Danish Holstein cows calving from 1985 to 2002 were used. In this period, the overall frequency of stillbirth increased from 0.071 to 0.090. An unfavorable genetic trend of stillbirth was found for both the direct and maternal effect. The background for the genetic trends was an intense use of HF sires as sires of sons, which increased the proportion of HF genes to 94% in the Danish Holstein calves born in 2002. The effect of the imported HF genes was higher direct effects of calf size, calving difficulty, and stillbirth compared with the ODBW genes. The maternal effect of stillbirth was poorer for HF than for ODBW even though HF had a better maternal calving performance than ODBW. The threshold and the linear models showed almost similar predictions of transmitting abilities of sires.

Prevalence of, and risk factors associated with, perinatal calf mortality in pasture-based Holstein-Friesian cows

“…The temporal trend of increasing perinatal mortality detected here, albeit over a short period, reflects international trends amongst Holsteins (Meyer et al, 2001;Steinbock et al, 2003;Hansen et al, 2004). This may, in part, be attributed to the increasing proportion of Holstein-Friesian genes ('holsteinisation') or the influence of widely used HolsteinFriesian sires in the Irish dairy cow population.…”

“…Recent studies in Denmark, The Netherlands, North America and Sweden indicate that the prevalence of bovine perinatal mortality is increasing, particularly in Holstein primiparae (Harbers et al, 2000;Meyer et al, 2001;Steinbock et al, 2003;Hansen et al, 2004). Currently, the prevalence of bovine perinatal mortality in cows and heifers varies between 2% and 10% across dairy industries internationally (Table 1).…”

Estimation of genetic parameters for melanoma in the Old Kladruber horse

“…mastitis (0.99) (Heringstad et al, 2003) and calving ease (> 0.96) (Hansen et al, 2004). Some papers also compared suitability of threshold model with that of linear model both on simulated data (Gianola, 1982;Adbel-Azim and Berger, 1999) and on real data (Varona et al, 1999;Silvestre et al, 2007).…”

Methods of assessment of worth of genetic resources of animals

“…The biggest weight for the productivity is given in Israel (80 %), but in the Netherlands this diget is only 34 % (the lowest between compared) [16]. Noticable attention is given to productivity in British index PLI [10][11][12] and Japanese NTP (in both cases 75 %) [34].…”

“…The most attention in Dutch S-index is given to the component "health and reproductive ability" (37 %) [16]. French ISU follows it (25 %) [40][41][42][43].…”