Estimates of Genetic Parameters for Milk, the Occurrence of and Susceptibility to Clinical Lameness and Claw Disorders in Dairy Goats

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Please avoid colloquialisms prevalent in New Zealand langage, as they cannot be understood by potential readers, who are not native English speakers.

 

Introduction: ‘After an extensive literature search…@ please indicate the databases used for this.

Data: Please indicate the inclusion and exclusion criteria for the three farms. It becomes apparent that the selection was biased, which might have had implications for the accuracy of the observations.

A seasonal goat is not a proper expression.

2.3. There are better locomotion scales that the one by Deeming et al. Can the authors please transform their findings according to the Kaler scale (2009) please, which is really the gold-standard in this respect, and can they please present the results modified appropriately? This will make their work of real value.

The definition for somatic cell score is totally wrong, sorry for this (the Scholtens et al. paper also had wrong, and there is no reason to continue this chain of errors). Somatic cell scores have been first defined in the 1980s by Shook in USA and that remains the standard definition. The authors may use their approach, but certainly that is not somatic cell scores (just use another term, no big deal there). As they have now, it creates confusion.

The results miss visualisation and this must be rectified.

 

The discussion must be divided into three sub-sections to allow easier flow of reading.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript by Jaques et al. is a very interesting and important study that clearly demonstrate the need for further studies in dairy goat.  Overall, I find the structure of the entire study and the presentation of the methodology valuable.  In particular, the  main findings have been adequately presented. In total, I really appreciate the authors' work, and before recommending acceptance, I highly recommend authors including a workflow. The work  needs a workflow/pipeline as a key summary figure 1, which broadly summarizes methodology/techniques and data sets around the analytical pipeline. In order to accomplish this, please follow PRISMA’s guidelines.

 

I also strongly recommend the authors to reconsider the publication of the dataset, because it is a very important dataset for goat breeding strategies, and without these data your study cannot be reconstructed. Therefore, it would be better to make the data publicly available.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

There are some recent relevant literature references that need to be added into the discussion before final acceptance.

Author Response

Thank you for making us aware of this. We have updated the discussion and the introduction where we thought it was necessary. I have added the following citations.

Mucha, S.; Tortereau, F.; Doeschl-Wilson, A.; Rupp, R. and Conington, J. Animal Board Invited Review: Meta-Analysis of Genetic Parameters for Resilience and Efficiency Traits in Goats and Sheep. Animal 2022, 16, 100456. doi:10.1016/j.animal.2022.100456 

Vouraki, S.; Gelasakis, A.I.; Fotiadou, V.; Banos, G. and Arsenos, G. Repeatability of Health and Welfare Traits and Correlation with Performance Traits in Dairy Goats Reared under Low-Input Farming Systems. Veterinary Sciences 2022, 9, 289. doi:10.3390/vetsci9060289

 

Reviewer 2 Report

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Author Response

We have gone through and made some small revisions and have further edited the document.