Animal welfare is an important factor for consumers’ acceptance of products (eggs, meat) from organic and low-input poultry production systems. There is an increasing concern and awareness about the ethical aspects of killing of one-day-old male chicks from pure layers strains.
Solution
Implementing dual-purpose genotypes, where females can be used for both eggs and meat production and males for meat production makes the overall dual-purpose concept more sustainable. Dual-purpose females often have a lower egg production than efficient egg layers, but the males are expected to have an acceptable growth for meat production with a compromise between the performance of females and males.
Description
The tool provides technical animal husbandry advice to support change in poultry production system to avoid the culling of day-old male chicks using dual-purpose poultry genotypes.
Practical recommendations address specific needs and suggest management solutions best fit to achieve a high level of welfare rearing dual-purpose poultry genotypes: design of indoor and outdoor facilities, enrichments, monitoring of performance parameters, innovative marketing strategies and collaborations.
In order to use the comment function, you must register with the third-party provider "Disqus".
When you activate this function, your browser establishes a direct connection with the servers of the third-party provider. We would like to point out that data is transmitted to the third-party provider after activation, and the latter may set cookies that can also be used for analysis and marketing purposes. For more information, please refer to our privacy policy.
Disqus
In order to use the comment function, you must register with the third-party provider "Disqus".
When you activate this function, your browser establishes a direct connection with the servers of the third-party provider. We would like to point out that data is transmitted to the third-party provider after activation, and the latter may set cookies that can also be used for analysis and marketing purposes. For more information, please refer to our privacy policy.
Activate