Learn about Whitetail deer breeding values with the Gamekeepers of Mossy Oak. Be sure to subscribe to our channel, and catch GameKeepers each week on the Outdoor channel. Tuesday nights at 8pm CST.
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We also have their genetic relationships. And so one thing we can do is we can estimate. Okay, what is the potential of this individual to be a sire. You know, so it’s very similar to what an animal breeder would do let’s say for, you know, if you’re looking at livestock. How do we pick potential bulls for their, you know production value for milking trades, obviously bulls don’t produce milk, but their female relatives do. You know so you can use these same tools to say, okay, what’s the potential of these bucks to sire offspring that have better antler development. And so the the estimation of that is called a boolean value. So in other words, no matter what that buck looks like he might have smaller antlers, but we might be able to predict based upon his genetic potential, that his offspring might be above average. Or maybe they’re below average. It could be a large animal that has very large antlers but whatever it is about that doesn’t translate into the offspring. And, you know, this is essentially for whitetail deer in a wild situation this is the first time that we’ve been able to do what’s been able to estimate these type of, you know both genetic relationships and then using some of those quantitative genetics tools to make some of the predictions in terms of breeding values. And the key to that is just been long term steady evolving a lot of deer and being able to capture and recapture these deer and their offspring and their offsprings offspring and go several generations down the road. So it’s an extremely deep and powerful medicine, and it’s pretty amazing.
