Investigating teeth eruption and eating quality

In Australia, a sheep ceases to be a lamb as soon as the eruption of its first permanent incisor teeth is evident. As part of a wider program to investigate a number of aspects of sheep meat eating quality, a project was undertaken to determine whether lamb eating quality would be compromised if sheep with partially erupted teeth continued to be classified as lamb. Overall, the results indicated that meat from young sheep with partially erupted teeth was unlikely to be inferior in eating quality than the meat currently classified as lamb