It turns out he was ahead of his time.
A team of Swedish and Danish researchers has found that sows
with good feet and legs have better reproductive performance.
They also found it’s a heritable trait.
Lame sows are believed to suffer from pain and stress
which is reported to have a negative influence on reproduction.
They found they could pick out differences in pigs by the time they are five months old.
"Significant genetic correlations were found
between new toe quality and new overall score and the number of live-born
piglets in the first parity (-0.35 and -0.31, respectively), indicating that
sows with even toes and better overall leg score tend to have higher number of
live-born piglets,” they write in a scientific journal.
The scientists from the Swedish University of
Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden, and Aarhus University, Denmark,
published their findings in Livestock Science journal.
