“…As the retail price of carcasses is essentially determined by its weight, beef cattle breeding programs have traditionally been focused on weight selection (GARRICK, 2011) and carcass visual scores (ARAÚJO et al, 2010) in living animals. Measurement of body weight as well as body conformation scores, carcass finishing precocity and musculature, are routinely used in beef cattle breeding programs to promote size and carcass yield improvement (TORAL et al, 2011 et al, 2013), and also appears to be associated with animals height, growth rate, back fat thickness and body size (FORTES;REVERTER, 2012;LITTLEJOHN;GRALA;SANDERS, 2012). Moreover, live weight is closely related to hot carcass weight, which is a measure obtained after slaughter, evisceration and carcass cleaning.…”