3. Find Genetically Important Animals
With the pedigree complete and reliable, the importance of each animal in the current population can be calculated.
In this example the current contribution already exceeds the wanted contribution.
How the importance of each animal in the current population can be calculated?
Per animal one should calculate:
1) optimal contribution (OC);
2) actual (current) contribution (CC);
3) mean kinship (MK).
This will result in a list with each candidate (fertile animal of the current population) and their contributions and mean kinship. The table on this page is an example of such a list. HouseName is the name of the animal, NOffs is the number of offspring of each animal. Note that the number of offspring differs from the CC (current contribution). There are two reasons:
1) a parent only contributes half;
2) offspring has offspring themselves resulting in an increase of the contribution of the (grand-)parent. MK (mean kinship is a percentage between 0 and 1; while OC is presented in the contribution required from this animal.