Genetic composition of Nordic riding horse populations and joint breeding value of stallions

• Riding horse studbooks has increased the use of foreign stallions steadily during the last decades thus challenging the traditional prediction of breeding values (EBV) based on national data as stallions might have too few offspring for the EBV to be published based on national data only. Genetic composition and genetic similarity of the 4 Nordic sport horse studbooks, Danish (DWB), Finnish (FWB), Norwegian (NWB) and Swedish Warmblood (SWB), were estimated using data from young horse test (YHT), 41 216 records, competition (COMP), 73 962 records, and 229 163 horses in pedigree file. The largest genetic contributors originated from Germany with an average genetic contribution of 50% of the genetic composition of the Nordic studbooks, while horses of Thoroughbred origin contributed between 7.3% (FWB) and 31.7% (DWB). Genetic similarity between populations was from 13% (FWB and NWB) to 57% (DWB and SWB). On average, the Holstein contributed most to the similarity with a contribution ranging from 15.5% (FWB and NWB) to 28.1% (DWB and NWB). SWB had the single largest contribution between SWB and FWB (51.7%), and SWB and NWB (43%), while DWB-stallions contributed between 12.4 to 18.5% to the similarity between DWB and the other studbooks. Correlation between YHT traits ranged from 0.68 (walk) to 0.93 (canter). For a stallion to have official EBVs in DWB or SWB, at least 15 offspring must have test records within the population. There were 631 stallions having offspring with YHT records in at least two ≥15 offspring in total). Including test records of offspring from the other populations increased the number of stallions with publishable EBVs from 167 to 255 (DWB), 1 to 94 (FWB), 3 to 113 (NWB) and 175 to 305 (SWB). Accuracy of EBVs for stallions increased from an average of 0.36 to 0.54 over all studbooks. Joint EBV is beneficial and recommended for the Nordic sport horse populations.

Subject headings

LANTBRUKSVETENSKAPER  -- Bioteknologi med applikationer på växter och djur -- Genetik och förädling inom lantbruksvetenskap (hsv//swe)

AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES  -- Agricultural Biotechnology -- Genetics and Breeding in Agricultural Sciences (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)