Effects of gestational maternal undernutrition on growth, carcass composition and meat quality of rabbit offspring

An experiment was conducted in order to evaluate the effects of gestational undernutrition of rabbit does on growth, carcass composition and meat quality of the offsprings. Thirty primiparous non lactating rabbit does were artificially inseminated and randomly divided in three treatment groups: Control (C; fed to 100% of maintenance requirements throughout gestation, n = 10), early undernourished (EU; fed to 50% of maintenance requirements during days 7-19 of gestation, n = 10) and late undernourished (LU; fed to 50% of maintenance requirements during days 20-27 of gestation, n = 10). During the 4th week of the gestation period, LU does significantly lost weight compared to C and EU groups (P<0.05). At kindling, C does produced litters with higher proportions of stillborn kits (P<0.05) while the total litter size (alive and stillborn kits) was not different among groups (10.7, 12.8 and 12.7 kits in C, EU and LU groups, respectively). Kit birth weight tended to be lower in the LU group. During fattening, body weight and feed intake were not different among offsprings of the three experimental groups. Moreover, the maternal undernutrition did not have any impact on carcass composition of the offsprings in terms of carcass parts and internal organs weights as well as meat quality of L. lumborum muscle (pH24, colour, water holding capacity and shear values) at slaughter (70 days of age). Therefore, it can be concluded that the gestational undernutrition of the mother does not have detrimental effects on the productive and quality traits of the offsprings.