Effect of Environmental and Dietary Enrichment on Production Performance, Digestive Process and Some Physiological Parameters in chickens

Improving the habitat of farmed chickens through environmental enrichment is considered advantageous compared to barecages, sincean outdoor or free-range environment enables and encourages chickens to express their behaviour. In addition, chickens that are kept outdoors or in a free-range environment can incidentally ingest sand, especially if they frequently bath in soil or sand. As a result, the daily diet of chickens fed outdoors or in free-range housing contains an average of 10-20% sand. In the field of poultry science, various enrichment strategies (visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile) have been applied. In this study, sand and perch structures were used as environmental enrichment because (1) they are less expensive than other forms of enrichment, (2) they are mainly made of local materials, and (3) they can form the basis for a comprehensive system of environmental enrichment for chickens. Thus, in our studies, experiments were carried out in 3 stages to determine the effect of environmental enrichment methods on the well-being of chicken breeds specialized for egg production. In the first stage, when the living environment of chickens was enriched with sand and perch structure, basic microbiological variables and physico-chemical blood parameters (blood count, haemoglobin, viscosity, erythrocytes sedimentation rate, and pH) were improved (p=0,05).The second stage of our experiment consisted of four treatment: 1-sand (S), 2-perch (P), 3 both -sand and a perch (SP), and 4- control (C) condition with no enrichment. We determined the ratio of heterophils to lymphocyte in chickens aged 22, 30 and 38 weeks, and we also observed that total egg production was increased by the experimental conditions (p=0.05). In the third stage, the effect of chicken breeds in the egg direction on productivity (egg production, egg mass) and nutrient absorption in laying-breed chickens was determined (p=0.01). Keywords: Environmental enrichment, perch structure, sand, heterophil to lymphocyte ratio, nutrient adsorption.