REPRODUCTIVE PERFORMANCE AND MILK YIELD OF NEW ZEALAND WHITE RABBITS AS AFFECTED BY FEEDING OLIVE CAKE OR DATE STONE CONTAINING DIETS

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Department of Animal Prod. & Fish Wealth, Faculty of Agriculture, Suez Canal University, Ismailia, Egypt.

2 Department of Animal & Poultry Production, Faculty of Environmental Agricultural Sciences, Suez Canal University, El-Arish, Egypt.

Abstract

The present work was designed to study the effect of feeding crushed date stone (DS) or olive cake (OC) as partial replacement of yellow corn on reproductive performance and milk yield of New Zealand White (NZW) does and bucks.
Three experiments were conducted. The first experiment was conducted to determine the suitable amount of OC or DS in rabbit diet by digestibility trial. The digestibility trial indicated that substitution of 6.25 % of OC or DS by the same ratio of yellow corn in the commercial diets gave better digestion coefficients than 12.5%.
In the second experiment, 21 NZW doe rabbits aged 4-5 months and weighed about 3.1 kg were divided to three equal groups. The first group was considered as control group and fed commercial diet, the second and thirdgroups were fed diets containing 6.25% OC and 6.25% DS, respectively. This experiment continued for two consecutive parities.
 The obtained results revealed that, conception rate, number of services per pregnancy and litter size at birth and at weaning were improved insignificantly in DS and OC fed groups compared to control. However, litter weight at birth and weaning and average bunny weight at birth increased (P<0.05) in OC group. While, feeding DS did not affect litter weight and bunny weight appreciably. Bunny weight at weaning, bunny daily gain and viability rates did not differ due to different diets. Total milk yield (4 weeks) was better (P<0.05) in OC and DS groups than control. The total milk yield averaged 109.55, 133.93 and 129.64 g/day/doe in control, DS and OC fed groups respectively.
In the third experiment, three males produced from litters of each group of the second experiment were randomly chosen after 2 months of weaning and fed the same diet regimes.At about 4.5 months of age, semen was collected twice-weekly for 6 weeks. The results revealed that, bucks fed OC or DS showed quiet improvement (P<0.05) in sexual desire, sperm motility, sperm cell concentration and semen ejaculate volume compared to control. Total motile sperm output averaged 329.21, 295.63 and 243.65 X106 /ml in OC, DS and control groups, respectively.
Conclusively, it could be concluded that feeding 6.25% crushed date stone or olive cake as partial replacement of yellow corn in commercial diets of New Zealand White rabbits gave better reproductive performance of does and bucks and milk yield of does.
 
 
 

Keywords

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics