Effect of electrical stunning method and cardiac arrest on bleeding efficiency, residual blood and blood splash in lambs

Five hundred and fifty-nine Southdown-Romney cross lambs were used in a comparison of the efficiency of bleeding animals slaughtered by one of three different methods. The main comparison was between spear stuck lambs that had been electrically stunned by either head application or a head-back method. In addition, some unstunned lambs were slaughtered by the traditional New Zealand gash cutting method, no longer used by industry but known to produce well bled carcasses. There was no difference in blood obtained during a 120-s bleeding time between the unstunned and head stunned lambs. For the head-back stunned lambs little, if any, of the blood not collected at bleeding remained in the carcass after dressing despite the fact that these animals released only 46% of the weight of blood recorded from the head stunned lambs during the bleeding time. The head-back stunning method markedly decreased the incidence of carcass blood splash in comparison with the splash observed in lambs stunned by the head application method.