• Main Authors: H. Wierzbicki, W. Jagusiak
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic; Arctic Fox; peura
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.521.9472; http://www.cazv.cz/attachments/cjas_51_39-46.pdf

Breeding schemes in fur breeding mainly con-centrate on skin size, skin quality traits and re-productive performance of animals. The skin size has gained great economic importance since an increasing skin length has a strong positive effect on the skin price (Filistowicz et al., 1999a; Hansen and Berg, 2004; Wierzbicki, 2005). In the last 15 years Polish fur breeders have aimed their efforts at genetic improvement of this trait. The skin size also became a priority in breeding programs in Finland (Peura et al., 2004b). The second trait that is among the characters of great economic importance is litter size. According to Lagerqvist (1997), an in-creased litter size substantially reduces production costs. However, the great improvement of skin size was accompanied by deteriorated reproductive per-formance. It appeared that skin size was negatively correlated with litter size (Lagerqvist et al., 1994; Peura et al., 2003, 2004b). Although these two traits are main selection criteria, the skin quality traits are also taken into account when selecting animals. Therefore, it is necessary to estimate genetic cor-relations between selected traits to assess potential negative relations between them. The paper presents estimates of genetic param-eters for fur coat and reproductive traits of the arctic fox estimated by multivariate animal mod-els. The study is another part of the project deal-ing with breeding value evaluation in Polish fur animals. Breeding value evaluation in Polish fur animals: Estimates of (co)variances due to direct and litter effects for fur coat and reproduction traits