COMPARISON OF SOME LINEAR BODY MEASUREMENT TRAITS OF LOCAL AND COMMERCIAL CHICKEN BREEDS OF SOUTH AFRICA

Linear body measurement traits are used for the estimation of body weight in animal breeding to aid livestock farmers where the weighing scale is not available. The objective of the work was to determine the effect of breed on body weight (BW) and linear body measurement traits such as wing length (WL), keel length (KL), shank circumference (SC), chest circumference (CC) and beak length (BL) of two (Hy-line Silver Brown and Potchefstroom Koekoek) layer chicken layer breeds. A total of 100 layers with 50 for each breed were randomly selected for the study at the age of 22 weeks. Pearson’s correlation and Student T-Test were used for data analysis. Correlation was employed to examine the relationship between measured traits in each breed. Correlation findings showed that BW had a highly positive statistical significant correlation (p < 0.01) with WL (r = 0.76) in Potchefstroom Koekoek breed, while BW had a negative statistical significant correlation (p < 0.05) with WL (r = -0.27) in Hy-line Silver Brown chicken layer breed.  Student T-Test results indicated that Potchefstroom Koekoek chicken layer breed was statistically (P<0.05) heavier than Hy-line Silver Brown chicken layer breed. Potchefstroom Koekoek had longer wing length and chest circumference than Hy-line Silver Brown while Hy-line Silver Brown had longer (P<0.05) keel length, shank circumference and beak length than Potchefstroom Koekoek. It is concluded that the results suggest that Potchefstroom Koekoek chicken layer breed is a weightier indigenous layer but keel length, shank circumference and beak length might require improvement. It also suggests that improvement of WL might improve BW of Potchefstroom Koekoek breed while improvement of WL might decrease BW of Hy-line Silver Brown chicken layer breed.