Comparison of body weight obtained through weight in digital scales or thoracic weight tape in Nellore males

Abstract

The determination of the body weight of the animals is important to evaluate the growth and the nutritional status, administer medications and parasiticides properly, adjust the feed and establish the value of the animal for slaughter. However, since there are many properties that do not have scales for weighing the animals. Therefore, there are other ways to evaluate body weight without the use of scales, performed through their body measurements. The most mentioned in the literature are body length, height of the withers and croup, and length of the croup. In the present study, another method used to evaluate body weight without the use of a scales, the thoracic tape for bovine weighing, was considered an indirect, low cost and less stressful method. So the objective was to verify if there were differences between the weights obtained in these two methods, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the use of the thoracic weighing tape. In this study, we evaluated the body weights of 46 Nellore males of zootechnical excellence, aged 15 to 17 months, coming from the farm Cachoeira 2C, located in the city of Sertanópolis - PR, obtained through the use of thoracic weighing tape for cattle And digital weighing. A Student's t-test was performed, with a significance level of 5% (0.05) in order to compare a possible variation between two means, the first one referring to the body weight obtained in digital scale (P1) (P1 = 411.5 / P2 = 394.7), variance (P1 = 1619.41111 / P2) was observed, and the second one referring to the measurement made with the thoracic weighing tape for cattle (P2) = 2367.14058) and in the standard deviation (P1 = 40.24 / P2 = 48.65) and that in addition, the P value was greater than 0.05 (0.074771791), that is, there were no significant differences Between the methods compared. Thus, it is possible to affirm that the use of thoracic tape to evaluate the body weight of cattle is an efficient and credible alternative method, being a tool that can be used by farmers safely.