This is a worrying trend showing that dairy cattle are becoming less adapted to the environments, which can be attributed to two main reasons: 1) increase in climate changes characterized by frequent and extreme weather, and 2) selection pressure on production traits over the years, given that heat tolerance (i.e., slope traits) is unfavorably associated with milk yield (i.e., intercept traits), with phenotypic correlations of around −0.80 ( Cheruiyot et al., 2020 ).
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Improving Genomic Selection for Heat Tolerance in Dairy Cattle: Current Opportunities and Future Directions.
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