Addressing Abscesses Found In a Beef Carcass

Check out this episode as Lindsey discovers the presence of an abscess near the tendon controlling the neck and head of a beef carcass. She explains the location of the abscess, its implications for meat quality, and the process of removing affected areas.

What You’ll Learn:

• Identification of an occluded abscess near the tendon controlling the neck and head
• Clarification on the distinction between localized and systemic abscesses
• Insights into the handling of meat with localized abscesses and its impact on carcass quality

Transcript:

Lindsey: Hey, welcome back to Blondie’s Butcher Shop. We’ve got another cool incident on the cutting table this morning. We have a neck abscess, which I do come across pretty, it’s pretty common. Not, not all the time, but I probably have at least a couple of months with neck abscesses. We’re going to take a look at this one.

This could potentially be an injection site abscess. I’m not 100% sure this one is. It could be damaged from another animal. They could have hit a fence, been impaled by a stick and it got infected, numerous things. But let’s take a look at it.

So this traditionally what we’re looking at, you can obviously see the kind of grody nasty abscess we have right here. This right here is the, I always call it the cable tendon, but it’s the tendon that controls the neck and the head. This is where the head would be. See one would be right here. This is kind of the atlas joint where the skull sits in here. So this would be the head that would come out here. So when we look at this, this would be the top of the shoulder right here coming down. So this would be pretty close to the front of that neck. The brisket would be coming down here. So for me it would be kind of odd to give an injection this close to the head.

That would cause this abscess. But as you can see, it’s just a few millimeters from the skin. This does not make this carcass bad. This is an incident where we would just cut this out and the rest of the meat would be fine. This would be considered an occluded abscess that is specific to one area. It’s not systemic. It’s just an abscess pocket. Here’s what I cut and what I found.

Not super appetizing. This is an older cow that’s going for burger. So you can see it’s got a little yellower fat on it. And this isn’t something that’s abnormal to find in an older animal.