Backup Sires

This report is generated when you request a number of backup/replacement males per mating to use in the event the primary male becomes unavailable for the mating.

What do values of -9999 mean?

The -9999 backups are all illegal backups because they contribute to breaking the objective function (e.g. target degrees). The -9999 backups should be ignored.

For Balance Strategies that involve hard constraints (e.g. Hard Constraint on Target Degrees) it is possible that most or even all alternative males are rejected as backups because their use would result in breaking the hard constraint. If you find that too few backups are being offered in the result files, you can try changing Balance Strategy to one that does not use hard constraints (e.g. Soft Constraint on Target Degrees). Depending on the configuration, there are still some situations that may result in few or no backups.

For optimal matings, we do recommend re-running MateSel in the event that a primary sire is unavailable, however, this isn’t always possible.