Effects of Sex, Feed and Pre-slaughter Routines on Technological Meat Quality in Carriers and Non-carriers of the RN⁻ allele

Abstract

The aim of this project was to study the effects of feeding system (dry or wet feeding with whey), dietary lysine level and pre-slaughter routines on technological meat quality in entire male, female and castrated male pigs, which were carriers or non-carriers of the RN ⁻ allele. The feeding system only affected the yield of processed meat, resulting in lower Napole yield (87.5% vs 89.4%) for meat of whey fed pigs. Further, lower dietary lysine levels resulted in higher drip loss of the meat compared with high dietary levels (5.3% vs 4.8%). Mixing of unfamiliar pigs prior to slaughter led to meat with lower internal reflectance values (28.3 vs 32.2) and glucose+G-6-P concentrations of the meat juice (46.3 vs 49.7 μmol/ml) compared with pen-wise slaughtering. In comparison with non-carriers, RN ⁻ carriers had significantly lower ultimate pH, shear force values and water-holding capacity. Mixing of non-carrier pigs prior to slaughter gave higher Napole yield compared with those handled pen-wise. Females had lower ultimate pH and higher Napole yield compared with entire males.

Keywords:

• entire male pigs
• lysine level
• RN phenotype
• whey

This work was supported by grants from the Swedish Farmers’ Foundation for Agricultural Research, Västsvenska Lantmännen and the Swedish Farmers’ Meat Marketing Association. The authors thank Rolf Grahm at the research station for taking good care of the animals and for collecting the data and Gertrud Andersson for carrying out the meat quality measurements.