[Music] we will start with the first presentation will focus on extended lane cycles and I would like to thank the discussion groups because it seems that you have been very active on this afternoon which is really nice so for the first question to Cormac it is asked are all the layers more sensitive for Salmonella yeah that's a really good question so I guess the answer is not a hundred percent sure and whether these older animals are more sensitive to Salmonella what we do know is that the albumin quality declines as they age across the flock and it seems to decline or it seems to be lesser in heavier animals that are inefficient PhD students working with me at the moment is currently evaluating the capacity for the albumin from these groups of 95 week old hens to inhibit a range of spoilage microorganism growth using zone of inhibition simple cell culture assays so it certainly seems that some of the hens in this older category I have less ability to repel Salmonella but I think generally it's an area that's very under researched but it stands to reason that with a poorer Hall unit with poorer albumin quality and with with possibly lower concentrations of these critical antimicrobial peptides that we find an albumin that are so important for repelling spoilage that if that declines with old age then it's a it's a concern that requires more investigation I think while you're still warm there Cormac we've got another question straight away for you and that is how important is the rearing period period in the long laying layers yeah so it's not a really good question I I feel like it's really important I think the breeders have produced a manual with very specific targets target body waves at different phases up to the point of leh and it seems to me that deviating from those targets certainly gone beyond those targets is having lifetime consequences for the entirety of leh such that animals which are a little bit heavier than suggested 17 16 17 weeks of age it seemed to be committed to being heavier true outlay all the way through to 95 weeks that we measured so when we're looking at individual animals and tracking them over time it certainly seems to me that rearing is critical I haven't done any research specifically and at that time period but I would be really interested to know from hatch what what the rate of gain and body weight at different intervals would have on lifetime performance so I think it's probably pretty important thank you Cormac yes I think we will then jump to the second presentation with a very important topic of feather pecking and for you and Murray I have the question is the nutritional value of the feed the root cause of feather pecking or can we say that feed management at the farm feed form meal versus pellet feed you know uniformity etc are more important thank you for your question and indeed next to the feet the nutritional value of the feeds the feed form is also very important for feather packing I think there was also a an example for pelleted feed and if you would use pelleted feed for laying hens then you can almost be sure that there will be fatter packing so it is good to have a uniform feet just to make sure that they will not select within that feet and leave the more fine particles out we want to have all of the feet the nutritional value in there and yeah I think that the management itself is also important that should be just a basic just not to get unpacking the management you could you should not try to change too much because they will react the changes of the feeling management as well as the diet by X by by some of their behaviors and that could of course be fatter packing they just want to react to whatever is changing Thank You Hemery we have another question for you are the peckers the hens that eat the feathers in other words what are the actual reasons for them to eat the feathers so there were some studies done in the eating of the feathers themselves and all of the hands do you eat feathers but the packers eat more feathers than the non Packers it's been found in the excreta as well as in the whole Gessle intestinal tracts and the reasons to eat feathers is like what I discussed that they might miss something within their diet or they might want to feel more full and might feel more saturated and therefore they start eating them furthermore if you just pull out that feather out of the plumage then you have it already in your beak so it might just be yeah that they just swallow it what I would do to to get to know more about which is actually happening and why are they eating the feathers is looking at the feathers itself because we we say that there's almost no nutritional value but there might be still some amino acids or very small particles that the hands probably miss in their diet and that's is why they might eat the fatter so we have to take a look at those feathers we also have to look into the hand side what are they missing apparently there is some imbalance in the diet or within the hand itself that it starts eating those feathers and it would be nice if we have this small experimental settings with just like 12 or 18 lay hands and we can identify which are actually the ones that eat the feathers and which eat them more than the others and if we can identify if they are also the Packers or the non Packers we could see why are they eating it by maybe opening them up or looking into the imbalances that the hands have so thank you very much for your answer so we will now go to Isabel well there is also a lot of questions with feeding hens in the loose hospital system and actually in the first question there are more questions so I hope you can manage it I am sure you can is the behavior consistent between flux so you know that stayers always feed from the top feeder so it can be used in practice and second to the stairs need specific feet to like more fiber for better fit for the coverage and if you see differences in gut microbiota between stages and ranges is it okay we all these together thank you very much absolutely so we saw the same pattern and all the six flocks that we investigated all the six flocks were investigated over time so it no matter if we were talking do summer or winter seasons or influence yeah of temperature we saw the same patterns and therefore I do believe there might be worth thinking of different feeds would be why worth to address yes maybe the feather loss and the feather cover but also to address maybe these behavior differences the more fearful that we've seen are these birds more stress do their benefit from tryptophan from vitamin A selenium zinc or whatever we usually do to manage those those hens gut microbiota is under investigation I hope to be able to about six months we will know about more about about that one Isabel Isabel you showed that feather cover for stairs is actually worse than it is for the ones that go outside the Rangers why in your opinion is it a cause for their remaining inside or is it the effect of it yeah that's I think that's a good question we don't know if the stairs are staying inside because they're the victims and that's where they like to hide or if these are the the more sick Birds a few people propose maybe these are the sick Birds who just don't want to go out but because we did a necropsy and because they just survived just as well as the others I think there's different subpopulations are just more likely to be affected by different disease but they're not by default the sick birds why I'm thinking or assuming why it might be beneficial to - yeah not to have stays in the shed is simply because the farm we worked on had about 17 of those sheds and way after they've seen the first results and so are the stay is stay up top they were concerned that those birds are not drinking enough because usually in these commercial every system the drinker lines are downstairs where the nest boxes are and not on the top tiers so they introduce trams and train those birds in the other non-experimental sheds to come down and in increased the egg production we also saw that stairs over time the stea population does become turns more into Rangers and becomes more excess arranged more often so by 74 weeks of age we do have an increased Ranger population but we also see you also seen that with increased age the layers start producing more eggs so somehow those two seem to go hand-in-hand and and that's where we really start thinking of rearing do we have to get these birds more confident to go down and not hide be fearful of their victim situation or whatever they experience what keeps them up there thank you know we'll keep all three of you on your toes we'll ask the question and we're not going to tell you who it's for just yet are the victims of feather picking underperforming chickens maybe with fatty liver or is the performance normal so is there a link between the performance and the feather picking so let's start with a memory first I do not necessarily think that Feder pecking and performance are linked so I don't think that the victims are under performance of course when they have those naked areas and they have wounds then they will be maybe underperforming because they need that energy to go into getting new feathers or just to their skin but it's not necessarily before they are facts that they are underperforming however I do think that in a case of like a fatty liver there is a nutritional imbalance and like I told him I in my presentation nutritional imbalances could be a reason to start packing so I would then speculate that the ones that have a fatty licit liver are the actual Packers and not the victims so Cormac you have any physiological idea on this yourself well I think I would generally agree with our Murray on this so what we know about these inefficient hens is that they're heavier they have a greater appetite in the region of about 20% or more than the low consumers and that probably reflects some failure to achieve adequate nutrients and energy to service egg synthesis so in the model that we use they were singly caged that they couldn't and engage in that behavior but I would be really interested to see if they were also the perpetrators of feather pecking rather than the victims because of that need to try and satisfy their appetite we did some analysis of the residue that remains of the refused feed of these adlib feather and hens and we sort of proxima analysis of the remaining feed and the efficient hens consumed more protein and the inefficient hens consume more energy suppose a look at a selection going on with mash diets so it seems to me that the efficient lighter animals are satisfied and the inefficient ones are not so yeah I think I sort of agree with anne-marie and other that could be interesting to see where do they have a greater chance of being feather crackers does it happen anytime of the day or is there any specific time of the day where feather pecking is worse than other times anybody I think it's mostly it will happen after the act laying itself so because first during the day when they start laying darks they will be very busy with laying the actual egg and then maybe that fence pecking is happening because of the uterus that is prolapsed and then after that they might go for a bite to make it--and who may go for a little bit of dust baiting but then they have just time to spare as well so then I think that that's the most logical time that they will start packing and back do you agree yeah I again not my area of expertise when we use the automated feeders to track a consumption rate per per minute and we looked at the profile in the efficient and inefficient hens we saw this very sharp peak to four o'clock approximately and then it just sort of collapses so consumption is steady through the morning but then Rises sharply in the late afternoon and it's mean it's maintained then for about an hour an hour and a half and then sort of drop sharply so I'm not sure if that's associated with federal action or not but they certainly get hungry in the late afternoon and I guess that's something we know from the literature and so whether that's Carly with federal pecking or not I'm not sure thank you very much both of you so I know we are closed through the scheduled end of this plenary session but since we started a little late I think we will continue five more minutes which will give space for one more question to each of the speakers and we will start with you comic and what do you think about the split feeding in these longer laning cycles yes so it was a really good suggestion and I guess what that's referring to is splitting the meals throughout the day we haven't done that we've we've a new batch of these hands and we've phenotype them and our strategy is to restrict feeds to them to this breeders suggestion I think the really interesting thing would be will that for these inherently inefficient animals will that rectify the problem or improve performance improve feed efficiency we are impacting on egg mass in terms of total our feed pattern we didn't see any differences throughout the day in terms of when birds ate or didn't tease they update both groups regardless of body weight seemed to have respond to this appetite in the late afternoon so while the heavier hens eat more throughout the day consistently they don't eat at a different time but I know in commercial practice some producers are using split feeding or segregating meals and they're getting a good result so partly Emory or a uniform flock have more or less feather pecking than and one that's less uniform any comments on that to my knowledge this has not been researched before but it is quite interesting to speculate on a uniformity and Feder packing and just as what I mentioned before I don't really believe that performance or uniformity is affecting Feder packing what you could see is that it might have some influences on hierarchy if you do not have a uniform flock but of course you know hierarchy is not related to Federer King what I believe is that feather pecking has more do with the variation between birds so this bird has a certain predispositions for the for making certain in synthesizing it in either the gods eater in the brain or maybe they lack those cells to make it and I think it's way more in the individual bird and that you can say uniformity if you don't have a uniform flock you will definitely have better packing it gets more to look into the variation that are between the animals within a flock thank you very much and Isabella is the question here for you other strategies you can think of that could be implemented in rearing to reduce prevalence of stairs thank you yet there's been some research going on about the rearing and what we can do to affect range later on our donna campbell has done a lot of work on introducing toys plastic toys having things hanging from ceilings music even light just novel things that are also moved around the shed that birds just become familiar with unexpected occurrences exploring their curiosity where they can still feel safe and use that exploration be that they have by Nature another strategy that one of the farms we work with is now considering and we'll implement short lease in their rearing a few rear system-to-system so you're really Avery system to place your hints later on an Avery system you know the day also I couldn't find it in the in the bottom tiers and as they grow older the the doors get opened and the birds go and explore so when the hens are then seventy the pullets are seven sixteen weeks and they're ready to be transferred into the hen house the farm will actually select the birds that are on top of the Avery system so those hens that were exploring and are obviously very curious and will place these hens in the free-range sheds why the hens that are selected from the or collected from the bottom tiers will go into the barn sheds just testing their hypotheses for them that they say if these are the stay is that don't want to go out why do we want them to forcing to go out if that's the natural behavior wouldn't it be better for the welfare just to let the birds do whatever they want to do and just have the uniform flock and such separated by the housing system so there are two different approaches that I guess we experimenting it bit at the moment and just see what comes out of that okay thank you a lot unfortunately the time is running out now and I know that probably many of you are sitting with a feeling that you had a question that we did not have time to answer here but I think that all the speakers will very willingly discuss these questions with you if you are interesting during the remaining part of the symposium if you can find them in the crowd so I think thank you very Robert for sharing this with me thank you Sarah and also thanks to all the audience who hung in here till the end of the day thank you very much and yeah and I think we should give a final applause to the speakers which I think give really very interesting presentation this afternoon [Applause] [Music]