Effects of housing system on the meat quality of fattening rabbits by NIRS using ethanol or freeze-dried specimens

With the purpose of discriminating specific groups of rabbits, affected by special intrinsic characteristics, whose partial extrinsic traits were low cholesterol content and weak cooking losses, the NIRS evaluation of the freeze-dried muscle tissue specimens appeared to be superior to a complete set of laboratory analyses for meat quality determination. When the fixation of the muscle mass was obtained by an easy and rapid immersion in ethanol, the subsequent NIRS evaluation demonstrated that the discrimination ability preserved almost 85% of its effectiveness, but resulted in an immeasurable great efficiency.