Large farm animals are used for the investigation of models of human diseases and for study of the underlying physiological signalling (1), yet they make up only 1.5% of the 4 million animals used annually in the UK in scientific procedures (2) while 28 million cattle, sheep and pigs were slaughtered for the food chain over the same period (3). Large animal derived abattoir tissue is viable for research (4) and may be an underutilised resource in both translational research and biomedical education that could reduce our reliance on rodent tissue and models (5). Homologous protein primary sequences from target proteins in humans, rodents and large farm animals were used to determine the closeness of match as a measure of the appropriateness of an animal model. The location and distribution of predicted and verified post-translational modification (PTM) sites were investigated in the same proteins with a focus on phosphorylation sites to provide a measure of potential functional differences across the species. Protein primary sequence alignment; phylogenetic analysis; and similar protein searches (UniProt UniRef) were used to establish species ranking with respect to their match to human. All three approaches yielded similar patterns with farm animal homologs (pigs, cattle and sheep) closer to the human homolog than either of the rodent forms (rat and mouse) in 7 out of the 10 proteins. The level of shared identity for individual proteins across all the species analysed ranged from 96% for BKCa to 28% for CD55. PTM sites for phosphorylation were investigated using the NetPhos 3.1 predictive models. Conservation of PTMs across species mirrored the identity data but with a substantial drop in the proportion of shared phosphorylation sites. For example, BKCa shared 96% protein sequence identity and 92% (38 /41) of predicted phosphorylation sites; ABCB1 (a multi drug resistance protein): shared 75% protein identity and 41% (17/41) of phosphorylation sites; and IL23-R shared 53% protein identity but only displayed 6% commonality (1/17) in predicted phosphorylation sites. In addition, some experimentally verified PTM sites were neither reported in databases nor predicted by the relevant software, raising the issue of database curation as a challenge in investigating potential targets across animal models. The investigation shows that functional site and conserved position bioinformatics analysis support large farm animals targets being sound molecular matches to human proteins and frequently better than rodents. Incorporation of a bioinformatics approach and improvement in curation of farm animal data could improve our use of the vast resource of abattoir tissues and may be an ethical and effective route to improvements in translational and pharmaceutical research.