Australian lamb - transformed by genetics  Saturday 1 December
2012 12:33PM (view full episode)   View comments (2)      Robyn
Williams: Even I can understand that.   So you can then add
extra selection parameters for reducing the fat thickness for
slaughter animals, and increasing the muscle area. So that has
been very effective. It's an interesting story there because for
maternal sheep, the mums, we actually want them to be a bit fat
because they've got to be resilient to droughts and winters and
cold weather to look after their lambs. But it's the slaughter
stock, and we usually call the dads of slaughter stock 'terminal
sires', it's a very perhaps sinister sounding name, but terminal
sire means it if you are sired by one of these big muscular
dads, usually you're heading off to the abattoir to enter the
human food chain.     What we are now developing is systems to
manage fat in the muscle. So we want fat to stay in the muscle,
but we don't want fat to be on the outside of the muscle,
because that's the