Browsing by Subject "voittosumma"

Finnhorse is a native Finnish horse breed and its studbook has four different sections: riding horse, trotting horse, pony-sized horse and working horse. Most of the Finnhorses are registered as trotters. The Finnish trotting and breeding association Suomen Hippos ry is responsible of the breeding value estimation. The official breeding value estimation includes earnings, racing time, time difference at finish, disqualifications and career starting age. The objective of this study was to update variance components for earnings and racing time and to estimate variance components for the racing career length and first year earnings as new traits. Data was received from The Finnish trotting and breeding association Suomen Hippos ry and it contained racing results from years 1984 to 2018. For this study, the data was limited to competition years 2000-2018 for earnings and racing time. For the career length and the first year earnings the data were limited to birth years 1990-2004. The data included trotting race starts from stallions, geldings, and mares. Geldings and stallions competed approximately 60% of the starts. Age was grouped annually from 3 years old to 8 years and older horses. Finnhorse can start racing on September 1st of the year when it turns three years of age and it can race till end of the year when it turns 15 years old. In addition to gender and age, the year of race was included as a fixed factor in the estimation of variance components. The data was processed with RStudio-program. The pedigree file was processed with RelaX2-program and DMU-program’s REML was used for the variance component estimation. The repeatability model was used for the earnings and racing time, since there were multiple observations per animal per year. For the career length and the first year earnings, there were one observation per animal. Heritability estimate for earnings (0,26±0,01) and racing time (0,40±0,02) were moderate. Heritability estimates are similar to those used in the official breeding value 0,30 and 0,35, respectively. The heritability of the career length was low 0,09±0,01 and the first year earnings was moderate 0,26±0,04 which was the same as the earnings trait that included all competition years. The genetic trends were positive for all the studied traits. The genetic correlation between the earnings and the racing time was high -0,94±0,01. This was expected since these two traits illustrates quite the similar features. The genetic correlation between the career length and the earnings of the first year was also high 0,65±0,08. This predicts that moneywise well performing trotter is likely to do a longer career compared to a horse that does not earn that much. The results show that if earnings is used in selection also the length of the career improves genetically.