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Poultry welfare
Proper animal welfare involves providing the proper housing, management, nutrition, disease prevention and treatment, responsible care, humane handling and, when necessary, humane euthanasia. These factors allow for the most optimal and humane growing environment. The concept of animal welfare includes three elements: the bird’s normal biological functioning, its emotional state and its ability to express its natural behaviors. Improving animal welfare can be accomplished through offerings like poultry feed enrichment, which can reduce stress, thereby increasing performance, productivity and profitability. Animal welfare is currently a major requirement for intensive poultry production. Beak trimming, stocking density, free access to feed, heat stress, and air pollutants became important issues, which are regulated in several countries. Animal welfare is observed by watching how birds naturally behave and even by looking at mortality stemming from aggressive behaviors.
There are essentially two types of poultry house circulation fan systems: vertical and horizontal. In a vertical circulation fan system, fans are located in the center of the house, typically near the ceiling, and are oriented to blow straight down towards the floor. The air then moves across the floor, up the side walls, and back...
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Preventing injury to a chicken’s foot pads (paws) is very important for a number of reasons. First, chicken paws are a valuable product, a delicacy in some cultures, and often sell for as much as two to three times as breast meat on a per-pound basis. Secondly, foot pad lesions can become infected, resulting in leg problems and a decrease in overall bird performance. Last but not least, a chicken’s feet are a good indicator of litter quality. Numerous studies have documented the...
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Annelies Kers (Utrecht University) Knowledge of factors that influence the functioning of gut microbes is essential to improve health and reduce the use of antibiotics in poultry production. The environment, and more specifically housing conditions, can affect the gut microbiome of broiler chickens. The gut microbiome is defined as the collection of all the microorganisms and their “theatre of activity” in the gut environment. Previous...
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Alex Alonso Wang (Big Herdsman) shows their poultry and swine equipment, explaining the features and benefits of the layer cage and the sow pen, during the Avicola Porcinos Expo 2023 in Buenos Aires, Argentina....
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Christos Gougoulias (Innovad) Modern poultry broiler production strives for the maximum live weight, which can contribute to chronic intestinal inflammation and broader metabolic syndromes. There is thus a need to establish realistic models that help the industry. Several challenge models have been proposed by the scientific community and these include biological agents or pathogens, chemicals, reused litter, and, more recently, different non-starch...
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Ryan Arsenault (University of Delaware) Significant research and development has been committed to finding alternatives to antibiotics that are at least as effective as conventional antibiotics in preventing disease and promoting growth. It has been well known for 70 years that antibiotics have this dual disease/growth effect. However, it was only around the turn of the century that consideration of antibiotic host effects on growth and immunity were...
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Christos Gougoulias (Innovad) talks about chronic intestinal inflammation models under real farming conditions, during the 11th Symposium on Gut Health in Production of Food Animals in St. Louis, USA....
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Annelies Kers (Utrecht University) speaks on the relation between the gut microbiome of chickens and their environment, during the 11th Symposium on Gut Health in Production of Food Animals in St. Louis, USA....
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Ryan Arsenault (University of Delaware) talks about immunometabolism and takes a look at feed additives such as postbiotics and butyrate, during the 11th Symposium on Gut Health in Production of Food Animals in St. Louis, USA....
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‘Smothering’ in poultry occurs when birds mass together, often on top of each other, resulting in death from suffocation (Bright and Johnson, 2011). The small number of reports documenting the incidence of smothering indicate that it accounts for a substantial proportion of overall mortality in free range layer flocks (Barrett et al., 2014; Bright and Johnson, 2011). In 2019 Australian Eggs Limited funded the Animal Welfare Science Centre and the Veterinary Epidemiology...
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I. Introduction It is expected that the global demand for livestock products will increase by 70% by the year 2050 (Gerland et al., 2014). As one of the most high-protein and environmentally friendly sources, egg production is an important human food source. Intensive egg production enables the production of cheap, nutritious and readily available human food; however, one of the challenges is to ensure the production systems also can meet the birds' needs, including comfort,...
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The common bed bug (Latin name Cimex lectularius) is part of a group of blood-feeding parasites called Cimicids. The common bed bug was mostly eradicated in North America in the 1960s. Then, in the 1990s, large cities such as New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Toronto, Montreal and Winnipeg saw a rise in bed bug infestations that spread throughout the U.S....
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Introduction Every animal production system experiences stress because of the numerous stressors on the farms. Stress is a biologically adaptive response to re-establish homeostasis (1). Heat stress is a variant of environmental stress caused by an increase in environmental temperature (and humidity) beyond the thermotolerance of an animal. Poultry birds possess a narrow range of thermoregulatory thresholds and are sensitive to environmental temperatures, which can pose as a...
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Heat stress is a huge problem in farm animals, as their welfare and performance can be negatively affected by extreme environmental conditions. When animals are exposed to very high or low temperatures outside their comfort range, they might experience heat stress. This can bring about various unfavorable consequences, such as decreased food intake, reduced zootechnical performance, alterations in the immune system, and increased susceptibility to diseases. Mechanisms through which...
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This newsletter provides an overview of silvopasture-based poultry production, and potential benefits and challenges of adopting this system as a largescale or small-scale producer. Silvopasture is an agroforestry practice in which trees, forages, shrubs, and animals are intentionally integrated into a single land...
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Animal production in the last two decades has seen a significant change in terms of improving the production parameters of Poultry and Livestock through various measures. Among the various tools used in improving the production performance of birds and animals, genetic selection forms the most important tool which has been employed. Various genes corresponding to important production and quality traits have been selected and regulated to have a significant improvement in the way our current...
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Stocking density is a critical factor to consider for optimum welfare of commercial broilers Stocking density is typically defined in terms of the number of birds per unit area or the amount of space provided on per bird basis. In commercial production, stocking density of a broiler...
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The first few days of life are some of the most important in chicks' lives. During this time, chicks start developing and set themselves up for the rest of their lifetime. The husbandry decisions made at this point can impact the birds' growth, development, health and welfare. This newsletter will focus on three important...
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Spondylolisthesis, often called ‘kinky back’, is a deformity that affects broiler chickens’ spines. The deformity occurs in the fifth and/or sixth vertebrae (T6) and leads to spinal cord compression making it hard for birds to walk, and in severe cases it can cause...
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I. Introduction Plant-derived isoquinoline alkaloids (IQ) have the potential to support gut integrity and growth performance under conditions of enhanced stress such as heat stress. The previous study revealed that the BW increased in the IQ group, and the level of FITC-d, to evaluate the gut barrier function, reduced in the IQ supplement group (Kitasato et al., 2021). However, a comprehensive study on the effect of IQ on growth performance and gut integrity under heat stress during...
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