The Mertolenga beef cattle, currently with 27,000 breeding females in Portugal, is the largest Portuguese native breed, despite some variation in the breeding stock over the last years. The purpose of this study was to estimate parameters related to the population structure and genetic diversity and to investigate the major factors affecting genetic erosion in the breed, based on the pedigree herdbook information collected since the 1950s, including records on 221,567 animals from 425 herds. The mean generation intervals were 6.4 years for sires and 7.1 years for dams, respectively. The rate of inbreeding per year was 0.183% ± 0.020% and the correspondent effective population size was 38.83. In the reference population (35,017 calves born between 2015 and 2019), the average inbreeding and relatedness were 8.82% ± 10% and 2.05% ± 1.26%, respectively. The mean relationship among animals from the same and from different herds was 29.25% ± 9.36% and 1.87% ± 1.53%, respectively. The estimates for the effective number of founders, ancestors, founding herds and herds supplying sires were 87.9, 59.4, 21.4 and 73.5, respectively. Although the situation of the Mertolenga breed is not alarming, these results indicate the need to adopt measures to maintain the genetic variability of the population.

Livestock behavior and welfare are increasingly recognized to be related, not only to the animals’ handling, but also with productivity. The present work was carried out at the Mertolenga Breed Testing Center and its objective was to evaluate the behavior of Mertolenga breed young bulls when exiting the chute, the reaction to novelty and human approach tests, as well as to understand if the responses between these tests are related. Twenty-nine Mertolenga-bred young bulls from 16 different farms, aged between 8 and 13 months, entered the study farm from the end of May to the beginning of June 2021. Data was collected on six different days and analyzed with the SAS^® 9.4 software. Older animals showed a tendency to leave the chute more calmly, take longer to touch the novelty ball and to touch the ball less often, with a consequent reduction in the likelihood of playing with it. In the human approach test, animals that came out of the chute more calmly allowed the human to come closer. These behavior tests should be further studied on potential sires, so as to increase docility and manageability of autochthonous beef breeds.