Quantitative Methods of Carcass Evaluation

Carcass evaluation has a relatively long history in the animal and meat science scientific literature and one of the first studies to cover the composition of farm animals was reported by Lawes and Gilbert (1860) almost 130 years ago. These workers completed a large number of chemical analyses and found a relationship between fat and maturity (age and weight); a finding that has been repeated by many others. In the early 1920’s, Moulton (1 923) defined the term “chemical maturity” to define the age at which the concentration of water, protein and mineral matter in the fat-free mass became constant. The 1930’s became the time for measuring growth and development in animals and providing methods to model it (Hammond 1932; Huxley 1932). In the last 30 years, work in the field of animal growth and carcass evaluation has centered on the growth of the carcass tissues and the prediction of the carcass tissues from various measurements (Berg and Butterfield 1976). Carcass evaluation probably has at least two important functions which includes an evaluation of carcass composition at the end of scientific experiments, and the provision of a system to evaluate commercial carcasses for value based on lean meat content. The requirements for both of these functions are often quite different. For example, it might be the objective of a nutritional experiment to assess fat or protein gains over a range in weight which would necessitate the use of a serial slaughter technique combined with chemical analysis of the carcass tissues. In the commercial evaluation of carcasses for lean meat content, the measurement&) chosen must be simple, easily and quickly recorded and have a relationship with carcass lean content. However, both have a common requirement that the baseline techniques used must be standardized.