Behavior of day-old turkey poults following routine treatments, with and without meloxicam administration, changes in a phased manner

Painful husbandry treatments, e.g. infrared beak treatment (IRBT), de-snooding (DS), and hot blade toenail trimming (TT), are routinely performed on day-old commercial turkey poults without analgesia. This study assessed the behavioral response following treatments with or without meloxicam. 150 day-old male Nicholas Select turkey poults were randomly assigned to five treatment groups: a low-pain control (IRBT, diluent); a high-pain control (IRBT, TT, DS, diluent); 2.5 (IRBT, TT, DS, 2.5 mg/kg meloxicam); 5 (IRBT, TT, DS, 5 mg/kg meloxicam); and 10 (IRBT, TT, DS, 10 mg/kg meloxicam) mg/kg meloxicam. As the study was designed to mimic a commercial setting, in which poults receive vaccinations via the Nova-Tech IRBT machine, there was no non-IRBT control. Poults were monitored by video for 24 hours post treatment, and behavior annotation carried out offline at half-hourly intervals. There were three distinct phases to the poults’ behavior. The period of highest activity and most variation between treatment groups occurred during the initial 6-hour observation period, after which activity reduced across all treatment groups and was at a low level from hour 13 onwards. Post-hoc analysis was carried out within Phase 1 (0-5 hours) and Phase 2 (8-11 hours). As there was no non-IRTB-treated control, it is unclear if the phased change in behavior was related to the treatments or reflects normal poult behavior post-hatching. There was not a clear meloxicam dose-response when all treatments were included in the analysis. However, within-phase analysis for Phase 1 shows poults in the high-pain control group were less active than some meloxicam-treated groups at certain time blocks Whilst the findings indicate a likely analgesic effect of meloxicam, pharmacokinetic data and more frequent behavioral observations, particularly in the first 6 hours, are required to further evaluate the impact on acute pain response.