The genetic improvement in pig litter size has been substantial. The number of teats on the sowmust thus increase as well to meet the needs of the piglets, because each piglet needs access to itsown teat. We applied a genetic heterogeneity model to teat counts in pigs, and estimated a mediumheritability for teat counts (0.35), but found a low heritability for residual variance (0.06),indicating that selection for reduced residual variance might have a limited effect. A numericallypositive correlation (0.8) was estimated between the breeding values for the mean and the residualvariance. However, because of the low heritability of the residual variance, the residual variance will probably increase very slowly with the mean.