biometric variability of arabia goat in laghouat (algeria) using the mean of the principal component analysis

Genetic erosion has a great risk for local goat genetic resources around the world and in algeria. this study is aimed to verify the homogeneity of arabia goat through multivariate analysis. a total of 111 females aged three years or more were involved. the principal component analysis (pca) and hierarchical classi-fication analysis (hca) were conducted on 14 quantitative variables. furthermore, 7 body indices were calculated. through the pca, the three first factorial components accounted for 60.50% of the total vari-ability (31.02, 20.04 and 9.44%, respectively). hca allowed classifying the arabia population into three groups that differ significantly (p˂0.05): the group 1 (n=30, 27.03% of the total) is constituted by the small-est goats, the group 2 (n=56, 50.45% of the total) is characterized by the highest values of body length, height at withers and chest circumference and finally the group 3 (n=25, 22.52% of the total) is character-ized by the highest values of width measurements and canon circumference. morphology indices calculated did not show a significant difference between the three groups for cephalic index, body index, body length index and thoracic development index. about body ratio, chest dactyl index, and canon thickness index, a significant difference was shown especially with group 3. this work highlighted the non-existent of mor-phometric similarity in arabia breed of laghouat region (algeria).