In practice, ANNs have been successfully applied in many disciplines, such as engineering, and economic predictions, and in medical diagnoses. There has been relatively little research into the application of ANNs in the field of animal breeding. This is quite paradoxical, as data analyses are usually carried out in this field, and ANNs have shown to be more powerful than classical statistical methods to carry out these kinds of analyses (Fernandez et al., 2006). The reported research has focused on disease detection and dairy cattle breeding, which is concerned with predicting individual milk, fat and protein production. Yang et al. (1999; 2000) applied ANNs to analyses related to predicting clinical mastitis in cattle and found that the technology was able to determine major factors related to the presence or absence of mastitis and to detect influential variables in predicting the incidence of clinical mastitis in dairy cows. Lacroix et al. (1995) and Salehi et al. (1998b) used the networks in milk yield predictions, and demonstrated that adequate pre-processing, a well-designed network model, and a proper set of variables may considerably influence the accuracy of milk production predictions. Salehi et al. (1998a; b) found a neural network model based on back-propagation learning useful in predicting 305-d milk yield, fat and protein. Milk production estimates were successfully obtained in a study by using feed forward ANNs by Sanzogni & Kerr (2001).