The Effect of Physical Contact on Pre-slaughter Stress and Fear Reactions in Broiler Chickens


Authors

  • Mehmet Kenan Turkyilmaz Department of Animal Science, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Adnan Menderes University, Aydin, Turkey
  • Evrim Fidan Department of Animal Science, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Adnan Menderes University, Aydin, Turkey

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3923/ijps.2006.1133.1136

Keywords:

Broiler chicken, fear, stress, tonic immobility

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of regular physical contact on fear and stress reactions and some performance parameters in broiler chickens. Broiler chicks were exposed to inverted handling with an experimenter for 5 min daily (Group-I), upright handling with an experimenter for 5 min daily (Group-II) and no handling (Control) during the study (1-37 days). Tonic immobility (TI) duration and corticosterone concentration were used to measure the levels of fear and stress, respectively. Present findings indicated that physical contact of human had no significant effect on tonic immobility duration, number of induction and the level of corticosterone in broiler chickens. As a result the body weight, feed intake, feed conversion ratio and mortality was not affected by this treatment.

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Published

2006-11-15

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 12 (2006)

Section

Research Article

License

Copyright (c) 2006 Asian Network for Scientific Information

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

How to Cite

Turkyilmaz, M. K., & Fidan, E. (2006). The Effect of Physical Contact on Pre-slaughter Stress and Fear Reactions in Broiler Chickens. International Journal of Poultry Science, 5(12), 1133–1136. https://doi.org/10.3923/ijps.2006.1133.1136