Sunday, November 24, 2013

Performing Beef Cattle Genetics Tests

By Susan Dawson


When farmers raise cattle in order for these animals to be turned into meat later on, it is always very crucial for them to perform some beef cattle genetics tests. Now the main reason as to why these tests have to be performed to simply check whether the animal to be slaughtered would have some irregularities in it. That way, farmers will know which of their livestock will be healthy enough to be turned into consumable meat.

When the livestock is still at the farm, the farmers have to know how to test the cows for their physical and inner traits. The first type of test they would do is the qualitative test which would check for any abnormalities with the physical aspect of any animal. These animals would be tested for proper body sizes, color, hair traits, or even horns.

After that is performed, then the quantitative test is the next thing that is done on to the animal. Now this test will be more on checking the traits that can be measured in numbers. These things include the weight, the fat content of the animal, the content of nutrients in the animal and such.

Now what some farms do is that they use sampling kits in order to test the animals that they are raising before they send it off to get killed and served later as meat produce. Now there are a lot of labs that offer kits like this so that farmers will know if their cattle are healthy or not. Of course these kits come complete with an instruction manual that one may use when sampling.

The easiest method of sampling would actually be hair sampling. All this takes is just pulling out some hair from the tail of a cow and extracting a small piece of DNA from that tiny strand of hair. He just has to follow the steps that the instruction manual of the kit tells him to do.

Now one would take note that when a cow is still very young, it will not have fully developed hair yet. In the situation, the more accurate but harder thing to do would be to get a blood sample instead and get some of the DNA from there. This can be done so that one will not need to do hair sampling.

Do take note that it is much harder to draw blood from an animal instead of plucking out a few hairs. One would still need to inject the needle into the body of the animal, and start drawing out the blood. Once that is done, the blood will be placed in a tube where it will be used for testing.

Now before a farm would pass their animals to the manufacturers to sell to customers as raw meat, they have to make sure that all the beef cattle genetics tests have been performed. It is only through that process where the meat that is sold to customers will actually be safe to eat. As long as the animal is already tested and found to be clean, then it can be turned into meat.




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