Demissu Hundie*, Gebeyehu Goshu, Berhan Tamir, Gemeda Duguma
Experimental study was conducted on station with the objectives of evaluating young age survival rate and growth performances of the Horro chicken ecotype in comparison to the exotic Koekoek and synthetic DZ white feathered chicken breeds. Nine hundred day old chicks, three hundred of each breed were set into twelve chick pens and housed for the study. A 3 × 4 completely randomized experimental design was employed to evaluate survival rate, feed conversion efficiency, daily weight gain and age at maturity. The body weight measure at the end of chick’s eight weeks age revealed that the DZ white feathered chicks built up the highest body weight (320.85 g) followed by the Koekoek (309.59 g), whereas the lowest mean body weight (281.87 g) was recorded for improved Horro chicks. The study also discovered that breed of chicken, age in weeks and interaction of chicken breed with age in weeks had showed significant (P<0.001) effect on growth performances of chicks before their eight weeks age. The highest per day overall mean feed intake (53.89 ± 14.37) was recorded for the Potchefstroom Koekoek (PK) chicken and the lowest (50.28 ± 10.50) for the DZ white feathered (DZ1), though these variation among the chicken breeds was statistically non-significant (P>0.05). In all the three breeds of chickens, males growth performance was faster than that of females (P<0.001). The low performance of improved Horro chicken both in productivity and young age survival rate leads to a recommendation that selection for chicken breed improvement shall consider the inherited tolerance capacity to environmental stress, and well organized record keeping to reduce inbreeding effect that might result in lower rate of survivability.
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