Copper sulphate and antibiotics as feed additives for early weaned pigs

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Abstract
Citric acid and three antibiotic-type substances—zinc bacitracin, tylosin and formosulphathiazole—were included in dry-meal diets for early weaned pigs up to 20 kg live weight. Two experiments were carried out and in each copper sulphate as 0.1 % of the diet was tested.In the first experiment the diets were supplemented with citric acid, copper sulphate or both citric acid and copper. The pigs given the diet containing both citric acid and copper tended to have the greatest daily live-weight gains and there was a similar trend in favour of the diet containing copper sulphate alone, but these advantages did not reach significance.In the second experiment diets with or without copper sulphate were supplemented with either Zinc Bacitracin, Tylosin or formosulphathiazole. All three ‘antibiotics’ had beneficial effects on rates of gain and feed-conversion efficiency, resulting in average. increases of 15% and 10% respectively. Copper sulphate did not improve the performance of the pigs when included in the basal diet with or without an ‘antibiotic’ and there was no interaction between the copper supplement and any of the other supplements.The performance of the pigs after 20 kg live weight under standard conditions showed little evidence in these experiments that the beneficial effects of feed additive use before this weight persisted during growth to 90 kg live weight or that any of the major measures of carcass quality were affected by the early treatment.