Journal
MEAT SCIENCE
Volume 95, Issue 3, Pages 616-620Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.meatsci.2013.06.003
Keywords
Pig; Infrared thermography; Heat stress; Animal welfare; Meat quality
Categories
Funding
- Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
- Olymel
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Infrared thermography (IRT) body temperature readings were taken in the ocular region of 258 pigs immediately before slaughter. Levels of lactate were measured in blood taken in the restrainer. Meat quality was assessed in the longissimus dorsi (LD), semimembranosus (SM), and adductor muscles. Ocular IRT (IROT) temperature was correlated with blood lactate levels (r = 0.20; P = 0.001), with pH taken 1 hour postmortem (pH1: r = -0.18; P = 0.03) and drip loss (r = 0.20; P = 0.02) in the LD muscle, and with pH1 in the SM muscle (r = -0.20; P = 0.02). Potentially, IROT may be a useful tool to assess the physiological conditions of pigs at slaughter and predict the variation of important meat quality traits. However, the magnitude of the correlations is rather low, so a further development of image capture technique and further studies under more variable preslaughter conditions ensuring a larger pork quality variation are needed. Crown Copyright (C) 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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