Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 18, 2025
Assessment of Acute Wound Healing using the Dorsal Subcutaneous Polyvinyl Alcohol Sponge Implantation and Excisional Tail Skin Wound Models.
Published on: March 25, 2020
Comparison between two scoring methods to assess tail damage of docked pig carcasses during postmortem inspection in
Roberta Maria D'Alessio1,2, Conor G McAloon2, Laura Ann Boyle1
1Department of Pig Development, Teagasc Animal & Grassland Research and Innovation Centre Moorepark, Fermoy, Co. Cork Ireland.
Background:
Tail inspection in the abattoir is a tool to help determine the welfare status of pigs. However, methodologies vary widely. Moreover, meat inspection is moving from palpation and incision towards visual-only (VIS) examination. This study investigated whether a VIS examination was sufficient to detect tail damage compared to handling (HAND), which ensures examination of all aspects of the tail.
Method:
The severity of tail skin damage (0 [undamaged] - 4 [partial/full loss of tail]) and presence/absence of bruises was scored using both methods after scalding/dehairing of 5498 pig carcasses.
Results:
There was a good relationship between methods when evaluating tail skin damage (sensitivity, 82.48%; specificity, 99.98%; accuracy, 98.98%; correlation ρ = 0.84). The results were similar for the presence of bruises (sensitivity, 74.98%; specificity, 99.09%; accuracy, 89.94%; correlation ρ = 0.79). However, the percentage of tails classified as undamaged was higher using VIS (69.9%) than HAND (63.55%) examination. Conversely, VIS detected fewer mild lesions (score 1 - 13.64%; score 2 - 11.73%) than HAND (score 1 - 15.21%; score 2 - 15.53%). A higher percentage of bruises was detected using HAND than VIS (37.96% vs. 29.03%).
Conclusions:
Visual evaluation is a valid alternative to handling evaluation of carcass tail damage and bruising.
