Social Dominance and Milk Production in Holsteins

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Abstract
Social dominance values (DV) were determined quantitatively in 3 ways from dominance, submission observations on 25 pairs of identical Holstein twins, 20 pairs of fraternal Holstein twins, 15 Holsteins without a twin, and 8 Guernseys. When dominance values were calculated separately for the observations on each of 3 days, repeatability of the measures of dominance value ranged rom 0.70 to 0.80. Correlations among the DV measures on 1 cow averaged over 3 days exceeded 0.98. Thus, the 3 measures of social dominance gave practically identical evaluations of dominance. Weight was the only 1 of 11 traits with some predictive value for DV in a multiple regression analysis. Its predictive value was not high. Dominance value has very little effect on milk production. Heritability of DV independent trait used in the prediction equations was approximately 0.4. However, since the sample size was small, this estimate is subject to considerable sampling error.