Improving the Health of Ethiopian Indigenous Chickens under Confinement

Abstract

For a large number of people living in rural areas, poultry contribute the major source of livelihood in bridging some socioeconomic gaps by supplying food and income and hence should be included in rural development strategies. Such bridging role of poultry is attributed to its fast generation interval and high reproductive rate, prolific nature, easy to raise and their output can be generally expanded more rapidly and easily than that of other livestock. Ethiopian has 65 million poultry population (FAO, 2000) that comprise of about 99 % of indigenous chickens (Alamargot, 1987). Indigenous chickens in Ethiopia are predominantly raised where traditional family-based free-range scavenging management system is practiced (Alemu and Tadelle, 1997). Thus, the birds are left to depend primarily on what nature offers. Indigenous chickens are constrained by inadequate information at all stages of research and development. Very limited information is available from the scattered efforts of research and development concerning these genetic resources. Thus, what has been studied so far on these animals is not tangible enough to show the relative effects of genetic and non-genetic factors on performance of indigenous chickens (Alemu and Tadelle, 1997). The cause for inadequate research and development efforts on poultry in Ethiopia could be associated to the lack of priority in development agenda. As a result, efforts on these animals have long been interplayed between “on and off” until poultry research is recognized and established as one of the national research commodity to date. Generally, despite the fact that indigenous chickens are huge in population and occasionally they have been considered to be disease resistant and adaptive to their environment, their contribution to human nutrition, gross domestic products, and export earnings are disproportionately low. Such sub-optimal production has been related to delivery of a low standard of management, health care and feeding. There is a general tendency that improvement in management, health care and nutritional status of indigenous chickens could result in increased output per bird. Thus, there were attempts to rear indigenous chickens under confined management with improved management, health care and nutritional status in various geographical areas of the country (Teketel, 1986; Abebe, 1992; Brannang and Pearson, 1990; Solomon, 2003), but all have failed due to serious problem of high morbidities and mortalities. The cause of failure of native chickens to survive under confined environment as repeatedly proved from high morbidity and mortality is not adequately addressed yet. Therefore, this study was intended to describe the etiology for unsuccessful survival of the chickens under confined management. The study also assessed the prevalence, clinical and pathological manifestations and extent of mortality, mean length of survival, mortality pattern, and incidence of mortality of five chicken ecotypes during the diagnostic phase. The extent and effectiveness of vaccination in reducing mortality to the natural challenge of Marek's disease (MD) during intervention phase was also investigated.