Phenotyping strategies for an efficient and holistic approach to reduce boar taint through genomic selection

Surgical castration without anaesthesia or analgesia of boars is about to be banned in Europe. This ancestral practice avoids the development of boar taint (BT), an unpleasant smell found in cooked meat of some uncastrated male pigs, mainly due to the accumulation of skatole and androstenone in adipose tissue. Animal breeding and especially genomic selection in the context of whole-male rearing has been recognised as a potentially promising strategy to avoid BT. However, challenges exist to define and to record BT associated traits. Required phenotypes must be cheap, available in routine as close as possible to the slaughterline and repeatable. This review will also cover new opportunities through different and innovative aspects of BT phenotype definitions allowing the potential identification of underlying genetic architecture and its use in the breeding against BT.