• squaresinger@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      Not a lot. Growth slows down fast when an animal gets older.

      So they are slaughtered at between 6 and 12 months, because that’s the time where the growth slows down too much.

      No point in having a 30% heavier animal if it takes 2x as long to get to that point.

        • squaresinger@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          Yeah, it’s like with the human term “child”. A child is anything from birth until age 12 or so. There’s quite a bit of a difference in that age range.

          For sheep, a lamb is anything up to roughly a year.

          In fact, sheep enter puberty at ~3-4 months, so a lamb will usually be slaughtered during puberty.