LIVE V. DEAD WEIGHT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 August 1940, Page 9

LIVE V. DEAD WEIGHT

BACONER PERCENTAGES. It takes a prime cattle beast to dress 66 per cent of its live weight, al-, though “two-thirds” is a general standard of computation. It has been shown that the average weights in bulk killings at English slaughter-houses are 58 per cent. There was an instance some years ago in the Argentine of a bunch of exceptionally heavy Shorthorn bullocks reaching from 70 to 71 per cent, but this was quoted as something of a record. It has to be said in favour of the pig that its dressed loss is much smaller than that of any other domestic animal. A test in England recently showed that a heavy baconer dressed as high as 781 per cent, and a light one 73 per cent. In the test, which covered approximately 1300 pigs, the pigs were weighed on the farms in the morning before feeding, most of them railed a distance of about 30 miles to a large factory, and were slaughtered about 24 hours after leaving the farm. In every class the extreme range of dead weight was 101 b, but the live' weights within the class showed a much wider range, varying from 20 to 341 b in the different classes. In other words, two pigs in a class might have differed by 20-301 b in live weight, but not more than 101 b in dead weight. Range live Av. live Av. dead • Av. weights weight, weight, loss.

lb. lb. lb. % 186-217 200 145 27.0 197-224 210 155 25.9 208-241 219 166 24.7 212-246 229 175 24.1 231-253 241 186 23.3 238-263 250 196 21.8 254-274 262 205 21.7