The gross morphology of skeletal disease in adult male breeding turkeys

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Abstract
The incidence of skeletal disease has been studied in two groups of male turkeys which were reared and kept as breeding birds. One group was fed ad libitum throughout life whereas the other was reared under dietary restriction to give body weights between 50% and 80% of the ad libitum values, depending on age. Losses during rearing were higher in ad libitum fed birds with lameness the major single cause. The majority of birds were killed at 55 weeks of age. It was noted that before death, more than half of the ad libitum birds were lame and the remainder showed gait abnormalities. By contrast, gait and posture was judged to be normal in many of the birds kept under feed restriction and none was lame. Post mortem dissections revealed a much higher incidence of skeletal disease in birds fed ad libitum. Although these observations suggest that feed restriction may alleviate skeletal disease in male breeding turkeys, it is suggested that such a strategy is of no long term benefit in parent breeding stock.

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