Effect of Dietary Supplementation of Lauric Acid on Performance and Carcass Characteristics in Commercial Broiler Chicken

An experiment was conducted to evaluate the effect of dietary lauric acid (LA) supplementation as alternative to antibiotic growth promoter (AGP) at graded levels on performance and carcass traits in commercial broilers. Three-hundred-day-old commercial broiler chicks were randomly allotted to 6 dietary treatments with 10 replicates of 5 chicks in each. Corn soyabean meal based basal diet (BD) was formulated for pre-starter (1-2weeks), starter (3-4 weeks) and finisher (5-6 weeks) phases without antibiotic growth promoter (negative control). Positive control diet was the BD having 0.035% chlortetracycline as AGP. The remaining four experimental diets were formulated by supplementing lauric acid to BD at rate of 0.05% (LA-50), 0.075% (LA-75), 0.1% (LA-100) and 0.2 % (LA-200), respectively. Body weights, feed intake and feed conversion ratio (FCR) were measured at weekly intervals. At the end of 6^th week, one bird from each replicate was selected randomly for studying carcass characteristics. Overall body weight gain (BWG) was higher (P<0.05) in chicks fed LA supplemented diets compared to BD fed chicks. Highest BWG was obtained in chicks fed LA-50 diet than those fed on either AGP or BD and was comparable to those fed LA-75 diet. Higher (P<0.05) feed intake was recorded in birds fed diets supplemented with LA-75 diets followed by LA-50, AGP, LA-200 and LA-100 fed birds. The FCR during all the phases was significantly (P<0.05) improved in LA-50 compared to other dietary groups. The dressing percentage was higher (P<0.05)withLA-50 comparedtoAGPfed birds, whileat higherlevelsofLAsupplementation, the dressingpercentagewaseithercomparableorhigherthanAGPorBDfedbirds. Nodifferenceregarding breast, liver and gizzard weight was observed with LA supplementation. The feed cost/kg gain did not vary among the dietary groups. Based on the results it could be concluded that, lauric acid can be a replacer of antibiotic growth promoter and lower dose of lauric acid (0.05%) used in the present study was sufficient in improving performance and dressing percentage in broilers.