EFFECTS OF ELEVATED PLATFORMS AND PERCHES ENRICHMENT ON BEHAVIOUR, OXIDATIVE STRESS, AND FEAR RESPONSES IN TURKEY POULTS

A variety of stressors threaten commercial turkeys, resulting in physiological and behavioural alterations that negatively affect both welfare and productivity. Environmental enrichment (EE) is a potential strategy adopted to improve birds' life quality and enhance normal behaviour expression. Therefore, the current study aimed to evaluate the use of different EE tools for turkey poults, ensuring that these enrichments didn’t cause stress and determining their efficacy in reducing the effects of potential environmental stressors and improving the birds' welfare. Randomly selected unsexed newly hatched one-day-old turkey poults were allocated into three floor pens with straw bedding for 7 weeks and classified into three treatment groups: Gp1 (C), control group, Gp2 (P), perches & hanging colored balls enrichment and Gp3 (TT), Elevated platform enrichment "turkey tree". Results revealed that implementation of EE increased walking and running frequencies in P and TT groups, respectively, and increased flying and wing flapping behaviour in both enriched groups, compared to the control. There were no statistically significant differences in malondialdehyde (MDA) levels, glucose levels, absolute or relative asymmetry, or mortality percentage, but enriched birds showed increased glutathione (GSH) levels. Fearfulness decreased, as indicated by shorter tonic immobility duration in the tonic immobility (TI) test, increased ambulation numbers, and reduced latency to ambulate, particularly in the TT group during the open-field test (OFT). This study demonstrated that providing physical EE objects can significantly benefit turkey poults' welfare by lowering fearfulness and increasing the expression of natural behaviours, supporting the importance of EE availability in early life.