Augmenting poultry production safeguarding the welfare of poultry using breeding and molecular techniques

Abstract

With the rising ethical and sustainability awareness, there is a global clamour for introducing welfare measures in livestock production systems, particularly in poultry production. Intense selection and poor management practices have led to emergence of skeletal disorders, gut and cardiovascular issues, stress and reduced immune response in poultry. Furthermore, in the light of climate change threat, there is a need to incorporate welfare in poultry breeding programs order to raise robust and resilient birds. Breeding goals for poultry welfare can include selection for morphological, physiological, behavioural and social traits related to welfare. Selection for disease resistance is another important component of welfare, and must be assigned appropriate weightage alongside the production traits in an index-based selection. Besides, advent of precision phenotyping along with the generation of real-time data and big data analytics can greatly improve the recording of social and welfare traits. This can be further complemented with the omic studies to identify genetic markers associated with the traits and to unravel the genetic architecture of the traits. Although, important insights are being generated on the genetics of welfare traits globally, it is high time that we, in India, work on this aspect and raise robust and resilient birds.