Sex identification of Nigerian indigenous chicks using Auto-sexing methods

Abstract

Sexing has been a challenging task in Nigerian indigenous chickens due to the monomorphism of chicks which makes it impossible to distinguish the male from the female until eight weeks. . Therefore, this study was carried out to determine the sex of Nigerian indigenous chicks using the common auto-sexing methods. Three genotypes (naked neck, normal and frizzle feathered) with different plumage colours were mated through artificial insemination to generate 176 chicks but data from chicks that did not survive up to ten weeks old were removed from the whole data. Hence, only 130 chicks were reported in this study. The chicks were sexed at day-old using vent and feather colour sexing. At tenth week, the secondary characteristics were used to check the accuracy of the sexing done at day-old. The data collected were subjected to descriptive analysis. The results obtained showed that at the tenth week of age for chicks initially sexed by feather colour at day-old as 55 males and 75 females the actual correct match corresponding to the secondary characteristics sexing were 48 and 66 for the males and females respectively while for the vent sexing, a total of 52 males and 78 females were identified at day-old but the actual correct match corresponding to the secondary characteristics sexing were 29 and 51 for the males and females respectively. It was observed that the vent sexing method was low in accuracy with 61.54% to 87.69% accuracy obtained for the feather sexing method. Apparently, the vent sexing and feather sexing methods are easy to carryout, cheap and relatively reliable with the vent sexing method needing a certain level of expertise while high level of genetic selection of purebreed chickens for crossings is to be maintained for the feather sexing method as to achieve an accuracy that approach 100% in the sexing methods.

Keywords: Sex, Indigenous, Vent sexing, Feather sexing