The dairy cattle breeding development depends largely on the culture of raising young animals of the cattle. Production and maintaining healthy young animals is an extremely challenging task for livestock breeders [1,3,12,14]. Breeding of dairy replacement heifers is considered a major element of the breeding system and milk production technology, since the formation of milk production takes place just in the process of growth and development. Individual selection of parental pairs affects not only the cattle reproductive ability, but also the growth of offspring [2, 4,13], [5-11].

The article presents the dynamics of changes in live weight for a year, measurements, body build indices and productivity of one-year-old pure-bred Kazakh fine-wool female lambs and crossbreeds of different bloods with German meat merino, when creating a fine-wool meat sheep breed in the south-east of Kazakhstan - “Etti merino”. The resulting crossbred offspring are characterized as large animals, with a high live weight and good meat forms.

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Relevance. Merino sheep have horns, their uterus is hornless. In recent years, for practical reasons, many countries are breeding for hornless.Methods. The article gives the results based on many years of observations and analysis on the phenomenon of hornless in the new meat breed “Etti Merino” created in southeastern Kazakhstan, the connection of hornless with productivity and the positive effect of selection on hornlessness on the breed.Results. The use of hornless sheep-producers gave a positive result, live weight increased, slaughter indicators, and wool productivity improved.