Abstract
Abstract: The objective of this work was to evaluate the allometric growth, the correlation of the cuts with the half carcasses, and the muscularity index of the leg of ½ Dorper + ½ Santa Inês lambs slaughtered with 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 mm of subcutaneous fat thickness (SFT). Twenty-four non-castrated male lambs were used, being distributed according to their weight into three collective pens. Slaughtering occurred as the lambs reached the SFT predetermined by ultrasound. The half carcasses were weighed, dissected, and separated into five cuts: neck, shoulders, rib, loin, and leg. These cuts were dissected and weighed into muscle, subcutaneous fat, intermuscular fat, and bone. In the shoulders, lambs with 2.0 and 4.0 mm SFT showed early growth. In the rib, this early precocity was observed in lambs with 4.0 mm SFT. The leg showed isogonic growth in lambs with 3.0 and 4.0 mm SFT and was the cut that best correlated with the half carcass, regardless of the SFT. The slaughter of ½ Dorper + ½ Santa Inês lambs with 4.0 mm of subcutaneous fat allows obtaining a better allometric growth of the shoulder, rib, and leg cuts, as well as a better leg muscularity index.
Highlights
The sheep herd in Brazil is of approximately 18.9 billion (FAO, 2018), the per capita consumption of sheep meat per year corresponds only to 0.6 kg (OECD, 2018)
One of the strategies to meet the demand for sheep meat production is to produce lambs with a high proportion of lean meat and adequate fat cover, generating a high proportion of first category cuts (Souza et al, 2013)
According to the allometric coefficient of the cuts in relation to the half carcass (Table 1), the neck cut was characterized as negative heterogonic (β < 1), i.e., there was an early growth of the cut in relation to the development of the half carcass
Summary
The sheep herd in Brazil is of approximately 18.9 billion (FAO, 2018), the per capita consumption of sheep meat per year corresponds only to 0.6 kg (OECD, 2018). One of the strategies to meet the demand for sheep meat production is to produce lambs with a high proportion of lean meat and adequate fat cover, generating a high proportion of first category cuts (Souza et al, 2013). For this purpose, one of the most used crosses in Brazil is between the Dorper and Santa Inês breeds, producing resistant lambs that adapt quickly to the adopted management regime and that have inherited characteristics such as rapid weight gain, good net income, and carcass conformation (Macedo et al, 2014). The measurement of subcutaneous fat thickness (SFT) with the real-time ultrasound technique can be used as an indicator of the best time for the slaughter of lambs (Nascimento et al, 2018), as SFT allows predicting the composition and relative growth of other carcass cuts and tissues (Wood et al, 1980; Teixeira et al, 2006; Mora et al, 2014)
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