Some of the Body Measurements and their Role as Predictors of Final Weight Using all Possible Regressions Procedure in Commercial Broilers

The profitability of any chicken industry related to increasing the production. Therefore, most of the breeders are looking for some traits that can measure in early age to select the best birds. However, several studies were conducted on ruminates, but there are few studies in the broiler. Therefore, the current study aimed to investigate the effect of sex on some of body measurements (body length (BL), shear bone length (SBL), body circumstance (BC), chest width (CW), leg length (LL), and thigh circumstance (TC) along with the estimation of the correlation coefficients among these measurements and body weight to evaluate the body measurements as predictors of final body weight using all possible regression procedure. A total of 60 chicks Ross 308 broilers (30 male and 30 female) were used. Results indicated that the effect of sex was not significant on all body measurements at the 1st and 2nd week except the body circumstance (BC) at the 2nd week. Whereas, the effect of age was significant (P<0.05) on the SBL, BC, CW at age of 3rd, 4th and 5th week. All of the correlation coefficients among body measurements were significant (P< 0.05). The R2 estimated by all possible regressions procedure to predict the final weight showed that The R2 increased with increasing the number of predictors and with advanced age and ranged 0.24-0.51, 0.41-0,76, and 0.63-0.89 at 1st, 2nd, and 3rd weeks respectively. The results of the present study showed that the correlations between the body measurements and body weight are significant.