Pedigree analysis of Thoroughbred horses in Slovakia

Abstract

DOI: 10.15414/afz.2014.17.04.122–126

Received 14. April 2014 ǀ Accepted 17. July 2014 ǀ Available online 24. November 2014

The aim of this paper was to evaluate the breeding population of Thoroughbreds in Slovakia by means of pedigree analysis. Examined population consisted of 123 mares and 10 stallions registered in Slovak Stud Book. Three stallions linked to Nasrullah line (30%) and 2 stallions linked to Northern Dancer (20%) and Native Dancer (20%) lines. Over a half of mares were represented by Northern Dancer line (50.41%).  The 64 mares had Slovak rating mark, 21 mares had German GAG, 3 mares had Swiss GAG, 3 mares had Czech GAG and 1 mare had Austrian GAG. The 31 mares had no own performance results. The average Slovak rating was 61.51 kg. There were 10 animals (15.63%) with underaverage performance, 43 animals (67.18%) with average performance and 11 animals (17.19%) with above-average performance in population of mares with Slovak rating. The average inbreeding coefficient was 0.86% in whole reference population (133 individuals) and increase in inbreeding per generation was 0.17%, in stallions 0.25%. The number of founders in investigated population was 949. The effective number of founders was 202, while the effective number of ancestors was 67. These results point out unbalanced contributing of founders and ancestors into reference population as well as the bottleneck effect occurance. The Northern Dancer (CAN) was the most important ancestor in investigated population with individual contribution IC=7.88%.

Keywords: genetic diversity, inbreeeding, pedigree analysis, racing, Thoroughbred