Sensory assessment of fatness and conformation of beef steers

Human judgement, based on looking, handling and experience, still plays an important part in choosing beef animals for various purposes. This paper describes an attempt at a scientific investigation of the method. Two groups of steers-(a) sixteen Aberdeen Angus and (b) thirty Herefords-were assessed by different panels of judges for fatness and conformation, regionally and overall. Repeat assessments were made on the group (a) animals. The carcasses were assessed by the same panels, then dissected into component tissues. On the basis of discrimination and consistency tests and correlation with dissection data a best panel was chosen for the group (a) animals. It was found that judges were very effective in ranking animals within the total sample but, contrary to intuitive ideas, the average score was better related to quantities of dissected tissues than the score of any individual, which makes the method more expensive than might be thought.