No sex with French sheep

Hungarian authorities determined that the new ewes would be acquired from the French, who are famous for their passionate lovemaking and curious appreciation for the art of mime. However, this plan has had to be abandoned. In an unexpected development, French sheep are now refusing to shag. This "Make Wool, Not Love" protest is directed toward Sarkozy for his attempt to make the French work for a living. The sheep, realizing that their primary job is to reproduce, are on strike and demanding socialized medical intervention in order to breed. (The French sheep don't know how lucky they are that the scientists weren't Greek.) This unfortunate turn of events means that Hungarian sheep cannot depend on the French to satisfy their needs or to provide the unbelievably strong, lung-bursting post-shag cigarette. Plans are now underway to find a suitable strategy for adding foreign ewes to the Hungarian sheep population. (Hungary experienced a similar problem a few hundred years ago and was able to sustain its human population by importing men from throughout Europe.)

Genetic Analysis of Male and Female Fertility After Artificial Insemination in Sheep: Comparison of Single-Trait and Joint Models

I. David*,1, L. Bodin*, G. Lagriffoul, C. Leymarie*, E. Manfredi* and C. Robert-Granié*
* Station d’Amélioration Génétique des Animaux, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) BP 52627, 31326 Castanet-Tolosan Cedex, France Institut de l’élevage—ANIO, BP 42 118, 31 321 Castanet Tolosan Cedex, France
1 Corresponding author: Ingrid.David@toulouse.inra.fr
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The outcome of an insemination depends on male and female fertility. Nevertheless, few studies have incorporated genetic evaluation of these 2 traits jointly. The aim of this work was to compare genetic parameter estimates of male and female fertility defined as success or failure to artificial insemination (AI), using 8 different models. The first 2 models were simple repeatability models studying fertility of one sex and ignoring any information of the other. Models 3 and 4 took into account the information of the other sex by the inclusion of its random permanent environmental effect, whereas models 5 and 6 included fixed effects of the other sex. Models 7 and 8 were joint genetic evaluation models of male and female fertility ignoring or considering genetic correlation. Data were composed of 147,018 AI of the Manech Tête Rousse breed recorded from 2000 to 2004 corresponding to 79,352 ewes and 963 rams. The pedigree file included 120,989 individuals. Variance component estimates from the different models were quite similar; heritabilities varied from 0.050 to 0.053 for female fertility and were near 0.003 for male fertility. Correlations among estimated breeding values in the same sex using different models were higher than 0.99. The genetic correlation between male and female fertility was not significantly different from 0. These results show that for French dairy sheep with extensive use of AI, estimation of breeding values for male and female fertility might be implemented with quite simple models.

Borrowed with glee from: http://jds.fass.org/cgi/content/abstract/90/8/3917