First, everyone talks about dress out on their breed, but what does it mean? The dressing percentage is basically the percentage of the live animal that ends up as the carcass. The general formula to determine this is:
Dressing percentage = (carcass weight / live weight) x 100
That's it!
The catch is that there isn't really a standard for rabbit dressing percentages. For most other meat animals, the dressing percentage is taken right after skinning/gutting (aka "the hot hanging weight). I'm thinking mostly of beef and pork when I think of this, but it does apply to rabbits. With rabbits, most people remove the pelt, head, feet, and viscera. Normally the liver, heart and kidneys remain with the carcass though and are included in the carcass weight. The catch is that some people apparently calculate the dressing percentage with the head still on, others calculate it without all viscera, etc.. so you can see it isn't really comparing apples to apples unless everyone is preparing the carcass the same way. Variables that can reduce the dressing percentage include muscle, fat, whether the rabbit has a full stomach before processing, and if the rabbit has a heavy coat vs. sheared angora, etc.
If you are really into crunching numbers and to ultimately figure out how many pounds of meat you get from each animal, here are some other formulas.
First, you would have to be willing to remove any extra skin or fat. The commercial term is carcass-cutting yield and it is just the percentage of the carcass that actually ends up as meat. Here is the formula:
Carcass cutting yield = (pounds of meat/ carcass weight) x 100.
The CCY seems to be more for higher fat animals like pigs and cattle because the number changes dramatically once the extra fat and such is stripped away. Rabbits have very little fat, but a more muscular animal would reveal a higher carcass cutting yield and ultimately more pounds of meat. Other variables that can change the CCY are bone-in vs. boneless cuts in particular.
Once you have that, you can figure out how many pounds of meat you were able to attain by:
Pounds of meat= (dressing percent x carcass cutting yield) x live weight
I think it would be helpful to figure out dressing percentage vs. pounds of meat when comparing different breeds. This is because the dressing percentage may be high, but if the rabbit has lots of dense bone and little meat, then it may not yield as much for dinner as a rabbit that is the same size with fine bone.
Mississipi State University has some great information about raising rabbits for meat or pelts for further reading:
http://msucares.com/livestock/small_animal/slaughter.html
They even compare New Zealands to Dutch:
| "Dressing Percentage of New Zealand and Dutch Rabbits at Different Ages |
||
| Age | New Zealand |
Dutch
|
| 8 weeks | 55.9% | 60.3% |
| 13 weeks | 59.2% | 63.3% |
| Mature | 58.2% | 62.8%" |
Welp, that's enough math talk for one day. Carry on and thanks for reading!
Too much math for a Thursday afternoon! :P
ReplyDeleteI find it very interesting to see the differences in dress-out of NZ vs. Dutch. To me, that speaks volumes in favor of raising smaller rabbits. Especially if you are feeding just a couple rather than a large family.
Haha, sorry! :P
DeleteI was thinking the same thing about smaller rabbits not getting a lot of credit. I know the handful of Dutch I had years ago grew quickly and felt like solid bricks. I still miss them sometimes, lol.