An average 7% of piglets are stillborn and around 13% of live born piglets die before weaning, according to Dutch researchers, who add that genetics may be partly to blame. Half the variation in backfat is heritable, for example, and easy to measure. Survivability is more complicated. In 1993, the breeding company Topigs began collecting data to find if genetic differences in survival exist between families. The protocol includes individual identification of all piglets at birth, even stillborns. All piglets are weighed and cross fostering registered. The current data set includes records of 600,000 piglets. An analysis showed heritability of survival on a piglet basis was around 0.02, which can be considered very low.However, given the fact the chance variation is very high a