The Effects of Handling Frequency on 8-Week Body Weight, Feed Conversion, and Mortality

IN EXPERIMENTAL work with chick-ens, it is often required to handle birds more frequently than in commercial flocks. This raises the question whether such fre-quent handling would affect certain meas-ures of broiler performance. In the fall of 1960, an experiment was designed to study the effects of handling frequency on 8-week weight, feed conver-sion, and mortality in broilers. The experi-ment, covering a period of eight weeks, in-volved four handling frequencies: (1) Birds were handled and weighed once at eight weeks of age; (2) Birds were handled and weighed twice at seven and eight weeks of age; (3) Birds were handled and weighe