Changes to the Docility Evaluation

There will be upcoming changes to the International Genetic Solutions docility genetic evaluation. Changes were introduced that allowed for the acceptance of docility records that were collected on a different date than when a weight phenotype was recorded. In order to accommodate the inclusion of records, the definition of how docility contemporary group was defined has been modified. The previous method of constructing docility contemporary group used an animal’s weaning weight contemporary group made up of: breeder, herd, weaning management group, weaning pasture code, weaning weight group, weaning sex, and weaning weight date. The new method of establishing docility contemporary group adds docility score date to the weaning weight contemporary group. 

For animals that had records previously included in the evaluation, the contemporary grouping information will be unchanged. However, with these changes we are able to add about 6% more records to the evaluation. These records were added either as animals with dates that didn't match or if they only had yearling docility; those records are now being included in the evaluation. 

Numerous beta evaluations were performed to test this new update to docility, and the correlations between the old method and new method were high (>0.99) with a noticeable improvement to accuracy of prediction to justify this change. Most animals will not see any meaningful change in their EPD, but there will be some instances of sire reranking for docility EPD. Please reach out to the ASA for any questions you may have during this transition.