Two people have written to me asking what is happening with EPDS outside of the USA. So I guess there are probably more of you who have wondered the same thing. There are only two places where genetic improvement programmes are in place and they are: Canada and Australia. Here is a brief summary about whats happening.

The Canadian AHEAD (Alpaca Herd Evaluation for Advancement) program is currently limited to an estimation of Within Flock EPDs, that is, estimates of relative genetic value of alpacas within single herds. This limitation arises because the Canadian scheme does not have a set of reference herd sires. As a result Canadian breeders will only be able to use the results of the program to compare animals within their own herds.


The Australian and New Zealand programme AGE (Across-herd Genetic Evaluation) is able to produce estimates of breeding values (not EPDs, but similar) across herds, using the pedigree information from the national registry. Again they do not have a specific set of reference herd sires. In this program, breeders choose which traits to measure from a list of 27 alternatives. This programme has data from two years, 2006 and 2007, and they publish the distributions of breeding values for each trait.

My group within the Affiliate Congress is coming to the conclusion of its work and will soon be circulating a wealth of information to AOBA members which they can browse at their leisure.