The relationship between heart-chest girth, body length and shoulder height, and live weight in Indonesian goats

Abstract

Knowledge of the live weight and rate of growth of animals is critical to the success of any animal enterprise. Decisions about the onset of breeding, weaning, supplementary feeding and health management should be made with an understanding of the live weight of the animals involved. In developed countries there are number of mechanical (e.g. clock face) and electronic weighing systems available for goat producers to purchase. The cost of weighing systems is a major expense and only purchased where large numbers of animals are farmed. These weighing systems are rarely used in (small holder) goat production systems where the farmer may own less than 20 animals and these animals may not be managed as a large flock but as small units. In many parts of Asia goats are housed in kandangs – raised wooden huts that hold 1to10 goats that are fed using cut and carry systems. In the Enrekang Regency of South Sulawesi, Indonesia we involved local goat farmers in the measurement of body length, shoulder height and heart-chest girth of local goats, from across a wide range of ages and live weight, to develop predictive equations for estimating the live weight of their goats. A total of 302 measurements from 135 goats from 9 to 61 kg live weight were used and heart- 2 2 chest girth measurement gave the best estimate of live weight (y = 0.0127x - 0.69x + 14.7; R = 0.92). There was some difficulties in ensuring the repeatability of measurements of shoulder height and body 2 length, and these difficulties may have contributed to the lower correlations (y = -0.0007x + 1.0027x - 2 2 2 24.6, R = 0.64; y = 0.0128x - 0.478x + 5.98; R = 0.75; respectively) with live weight. The process of estimating live weight from heart-girth measurement was embraced by goat farmers as a cheap and effective management tool, partly as they were directly involved in the generation of the relationship, and as a cheap husbandry (and marketing) tool for measuring and thus managing their goats.