An examination of the relationships between live weight and body measurements in karacabey merino sheep through the path analysis approach

Abstract

Direct and indirect effects of some of the body measurements on Karacabey Merino Sheep"s live weights were estimated using a path analysis in this study. When setting the path model, live weight, back length, body length, shin girth, chest depth, rump width and chest girth measurements of 249 Karacabey Merino sheep of which ages varied between 1 and 4 years were utilized. According to the two-equation causal path model, the body measurement which had the highest direct effect on live weight was chest girth, and it was also shown that chest depth and rump width had indirect effects. It was found that the model expressed a good fit according to the goodness of fit criteria. Consequently, it was revealed that the body measurement which had the greatest contribution to the model set for live weight estimation was chest girth and causal relations between the independent variables variable could be shown with the path analysis.

Keywords

• path analysis
• path diagram
• karacabey merino sheep
• live weight