Applied Animal Nutrition-I

SLAUGHTER EXPERIMENTS

• Slaughter experiments involves the analysis of certain specific tissues or of the body as a whole,
• In studies of the protein requirement for growth or of the comparitive value of different protein sources, it is important to know the specific effect in terms of protein tisuue formed, since the increase in the body as a whole is due to water, fat and minerals as well as protein, the relationship may vary.
• To study the effect of a given diet on changes in body composition, a group of like animals are selected and a part of them are slaughtered and analysed at the start of the experiment.
• The others are fed different experimental diets for a given period and then slaughtered and analyzed.
• The difference in their composition from that of the animals killed at the start reveals the effect of the diet fed.
• In general, small laboratory animals are much easier to work with than the larger farm animals.

Advantages

• The slaughter method has found its greatest application in studying the nutrition of beef cattle, sheep and swine.
• Slaughter diets may also include various measures of market value, such as dressing percentages and quality of the carcass and such measures are frequently used in meat production experiments
• To study the influence of a given ration, upon the quality of the product and upon its selling price.

Disadvantages

• It requires much more time and labour than is involved in merely weighing feed and animals.
• Difficult problems are presented in the selection of representative samples of tissues and in their preparation for analysis.
• For each period of observation, a sufficiently large number of animals must be examined to minimize the large individual variability in composition.