Ex situ improvement of indigenous chicken in Bangladesh

Abstract

This work is part of a long-term selection program carried out (i) to assess the performance of three indigenous chicken genotypes under intensive management and (ii) to evaluate the response to selection of three indigenous chicken genotypes. A total of 5945 day-old chicks representing three types of indigenous chicken genotypes namely Naked Neck (NN), Hilly (H) and Nondescript Deshi (ND) were hatched for foundation generation (G 0), first generation (G 1), second generation (G 2) and third generation (G 3) for this study. In every generation, selection was practiced at 40-week of age on the basis of an index comprising the parameters of age at first egg (AFE), body weight (BW), egg production (EP) and egg weight (EW). The average body weights of ND, H and NN were 1074±4.0, 1279.6±5.5 and 1041.0±5.7 g, respectively at the age of 16 weeks. The mean daily weight gain of indigenous chicken at 0-8, 0-12, 0-16 week and 0-maturity were 7.8±0.02, 9.4±0.02, 9.8±0.02 and 8.2±0.03 g, respectively. The lowest hatchability was found in NN genotype (77.5%). The average egg production of ND, H and NN were 83.9±1.1, 76.2±1.4 and 74.0±1.5, respectively. Among the three indigenous chicken types, ND had significantly higher (p<0.001) average number of eggs for a given period than H and NN genotypes. In terms of body weight, H genotype was superior. Based on the performance of the four generations, the study revealed that H genotype to be a good base population to be developed as a meet producing strain whereas nondescript Deshi chicken could be improved for.