Indian Journal of Animal Research

  • Chief EditorK.M.L. Pathak

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Indian Journal of Animal Research, volume 49 issue 4 (august 2015) : 527-531

Morphological differentiation of indigenous goats in different agro-ecological zones of Vhembe district, Limpopo province, South Africa

Tlou C. Selolo, Majela L. Mashiloane, David Norris, Jones W. Ng’ambi, David Brown
1Department of Animal Production, University of Limpopo, Private Bag X1106, Sovenga, 0727, South Africa.
Cite article:- Selolo C. Tlou, Mashiloane L. Majela, Norris David, Ng’ambi W. Jones, Brown David (2024). Morphological differentiation of indigenous goats in different agro-ecological zones of Vhembe district, Limpopo province, South Africa. Indian Journal of Animal Research. 49(4): 527-531. doi: 10.5958/0976-0555.2015.00052.7.
The study was carried out to differentiate indigenous female goats in different agro-ecological zones based on their morphological traits. 551 mature female goats from semi-arid, dry sub-humid and humid agro-ecological zones were considered in this study. The morphological traits analysed were Body Weight, Body Length, Shoulder Height, Hip Height and Heart Girth. Stepwise discriminant analysis was used to check the discriminating power of the variables. Canonical discriminant procedure was applied to determine differences between indigenous goats in different zones. The analysis showed that all the variables measured have discriminating power. In canonical discriminant analysis, the first canonical variable determined was significant and accounted for 91.87% of the variation, but the second canonical variable was not significant and accounted 8.13% of the variation. The pairwise Mahalanobis distances between indigenous goats in semi-arid and dry sub-humid as well as between semi-arid and humid were significant. The pairwise distance between goats in dry sub-humid and humid was not significant. Discriminant model function correctly allocated 60.31% (semi-arid), 58.06% (humid) and 38.46% (dry sub-humid) of indigenous goats into their original agro-ecological zone.
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