| Body weight and four morphostructural traits namely body length, heart girth, thigh circumference and ear length of 103 New Zealand White x Chinchilla crossbred rabbits were measured. The investigation aimed at describing objectively the interdependence among conformation traits and to predict body weight from their independent factor scores using principal component analysis. Phenotypic correlations between body weight and body dimensions were highly significant (r=0.61 0.91; P<0.01). Pairwise correlations of the body shape characters ranged from moderate to high values. From the factor analysis with varimax rotation of the intercorrelated traits, two principal components which accounted for 90.27% of the total variance were extracted. The first... |
