THE EFFECT OF SOME GENETIC AND NONGENETIC FACTORS ON FERTILITY AND GROWTH TRAITS IN AWASSI SHEEP

The study included 300 records to study the effect of genetic group and age on fertility (FER) and prolificacy (PRO) traits, and the effect of genetic group, age and sex of lamb on birth weight (BW), weaning weight (WW), and daily gain (DG) from birth to weaning at research station of Sheep and Goat in Abo-Ghraib General Directorate of Agriculture research. Overall means of (FER) and (PRO) were 90.67% and 1.09, respectively and for (BW), (WW) and (DG) were 3.678, 19.457 and 0.168 kg, respectively, There was no significant effect for genetic group on both (FER) and (PRO) and significant effect (P>0.05) on growth traits. There was a significant effect (P>0.05) for age of dam on (PRO), and (DG), and a highly significant effect (P>0.01) on (BW) and (WW). There was no significant effect for sex on all growth traits. The results showed that the regression of (FER) and (PRO) on dam's weight at birth was highly significant (P>0.01) which can make an advantage of this relation to predict the (PRO) and (FER) by the weight of dam at birth.