EVALUATION OF PHYSICAL BODY TRAITS AND SOME BLOOD CHARACTERISTICS OF WEST AFRICAN DWARF GOATS IN SOUTHWESTERN NIGERIA

Abstract

Two hundred West African Dwarf (WAD) goats aged 1-6 years were examined during a 10-months period, from October, 2003 to July, 2004 in randomly selected locations within South Western Zones of Nigeria. Qualitative traits namely coat colour, polled trait, presence or absence of teat, wattle and beard were examined and described in all the experimental animals. Black colour observed in 54% of the animals predominate while brown and mixed colours accounted for 16% and 30% of all the animals respectively. All goats studio irrespective of sex were horned. The goats had a pair of teat each except eight goats with supernumerary teats. Possession of beard was common in all bucks observed but 8.5% of the females had. beard. About 36.5% of all the WAD goats examined possessed wattle. The linear body measurements recorded in this study included body length (BL), chest girth (CG), height at girth (HG), height at wither (HW), leg lcngtl. (LL), shoulder to tail length (STL), nose to shoulder length (NL), tail length (TL) and ear length (EL). There was no sex difference in body weight and linear body' measurements with the exception ofTL. Location effects were observed for HW, TL and EL while the effect or age was significant (1)<0.05) for body weight arid linear body measurement apart from CG and NSL. In general, the body weight, linear body measurements (except HE, EL and CG) and blood parameters (except MCV,' MCHC and ALB: GLB) were not significantly (P>0.05) influenced by the qualitative traits studied. Correlations among the traits were positive and among all the linear body measurements reported, BL, HW and LL could be used to predict the body weight. Location, sex and age had 110 significant (P>O.OS) effect on the haematogical indices studied-except RBC and some erythrocyte indices (MCV and MCH). With the exception of ALB: GLB, all serum indices were not significantly influenced by location, sex and age.