The effect of age and fatness on the meat quality and quantity of beef cattle, 9: Relationships between body measurements, carcass measurements, and tissue weights

Studies related to the growth and development of tissues and meat quality characteristics give us the important information for breeding, feeding, and use of cattle as meat. In this regard, the author had conducted a series of experiments, in which groups of Japanese Black Breed steers were fed several diets differing in their nutritional levels. Sets of animals selected from the groups were slaughtered at ages ranging between 8 and 30 months. Using the data of steers fed a high nutritional diet, changes in the growth phase of individual tissues, organs, and meat quality characteristics were studied by analysis of the growth curves. Using the data of steers fed various diets, the relative magnitudes of the nutritional effects on individual tissues, organs, body measurements, and carcass measurements were calculated. These results have been reported previously. The studies mentioned above were compared with those related to breeding and feeding. In this report, the relationships between body measurements, carcass measurements, and tissue weight were studied in relation to their use for fattened steers as meat animal. Relationships between body measurements and carcass measurements. Since the evaluation of live cattle should be conducted with the carcass characteristics in mind, correlation coefficients in the allometric regressions between body measurements and carcass measurements were calculated. Although these correlation coefficients were highly significant, the height at withers, height at hip, and body length, which were considered to be affected only slightly by the nutritional level in the diet, showed higher correlation coefficients with the carcass length, which were considered to be affected only slightly by the nutritional level, than the carcass thickness