sim.-ang.king":1fiyxunj said:
alexfarms":1fiyxunj said:
In theory, linebreeding increases homozygosity of gene pairs. If you increase homozygosity your gonna make one animal homozygous for positive genes and another homozygous for negative genes. So you will get superior animals and inferior animals. You keep the superiors and cull the inferiors and hope you can maintain enough numbers to keep the line going.
So it appears after 70 some odd years they still haven't been able to cull out the one's suffering from dwarfism and bad udders.
I'm pretty sure there are no actual dwarfs in the crop, using the true definition of the genetic abnormality of dwarfism. But you bring up a good point: after 70+ years of selection for high growth, within the line, a great deal of variation in growth still exists within the line.
As for udders, I agree, they haven't improved them. I don't think they paid much attention to udder score when they made their selections. They have concentrated mainly on growth. The herd has been used in several long term USDA experiments. I bought a couple darn good uddered cows from Miles City and I bought a few that had horrid udders.