Towards the development of a next generation MSA lamb model – statistical support

Summary

​This work developed the analyses relating consumer judgements of sheep meat eating quality for the Loin and Topside to sire effects for genetic improvement. A discriminant function related the attributes of the sensory variables, tenderness, juiciness, flavour and overall liking to consumer judgement of eating excellence. Variation in this function described sire differences for effects due to year, sire breed, processing site and consumer's variation, and was related to eating quality. Consumer judgements using different reference criteria resulted in difficult frequency distributions. This was alleviated by weighting each observation by consumer variances for each of the sensory variables to calculate sire intra-class correlations. A function relating carcass attributes to consumer eating quality through a discriminant function was developed and related to sire differences for genetic improvement.