Abstract

Two hundred West African Dwarf (WAD) goats aged 1 to 6 years were examined during a ten months period, from October 2003 to July 2004 in randomly selected locations within Southwestern zone of Nigeria. Qualitative traits namely coat colour, polled trait, presence or absence of teat, wattle and beard were examined and described in all the experimental animals. Black colour observed in 54% of the animals predominated while brown and mixed colours accounted for 16 and 30% of all the animals respectively. All goats studied irrespective of sex were horned. The goats had a pair of teat each except eight goats with supernumerary teats. Possession of beard was common in all bucks observed, but 8.5% of the females had beard. About 36.5% of all the WAD goats examined possessed wattle. The phenotypic frequency of wattle and beard in WAD population was 0.37 and 0.21 respectively.

Key words: West African dwarf (WAD) goat, qualitative traits, management, frequencies.