Means of improving the efficiency of meat production and product quality are being actively sought by the sheep industry. The fact that variation in growth rate appears to account for more of the variation in amount of lean meat produced in a given period of time than does variation in proportion of lean in the carcass, and the greater ease and accuracy of measuring the former in live animals, suggest that selection programs should place more emphasis on growth rate than on measures of carcass composition. This subject has been discussed by Bradford (1967). The present study was designed to provide estimates from an actual progeny test of the relative contribution of variation in growth rate and in carcass composition to response to selection for meat production, and to obtain information on the relative accuracy of different measures of growth rate and carcass cutability on rams for prediction of progeny performance.
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Bradford et al. (1972) studied this question.