Social Dominance and Milk Production in Holsteins

Abstract

Social dominance values (DV) were determined quantitatively in three ways from dominance submission observations on 25 pairs of identical Holstein twins, 20 pairs of fraternal Holstein twins, 15 Holsteins without a twin, and eight Guernseys. When dominance values were calculated separately for the observations on each of three days, repeatability of the measures of dominance value ranged from 0.70 to 0.80. Correlations among the DV measures on one cow averaged over three days all exceeded 0.98. Thus, the three measures of social dominance gave practically identical evaluations of dominance.