The question of selecting the best laying hens is not new, but with climate change and the evolution of farming methods, birds must adapt. Researchers have managed to select those that best resist viruses and temperature variations.
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Finding hens that are resistant to temperature variations and that thrive in the open air with playmates likely to transmit diseases to them is the new challenge for researchers. Because soon, there will be no more chickens in cages, it is an objective of the European Union by 2027. In the future, we will also give less medicine to animals.
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Researchers from the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAe) have therefore selected the most resistant hens and those which recover best after an infection. They studied the laying of 77,000 hens, observing the number of eggs laid with very precise indicators of the state of the animal. With their colleagues from the University of Wageningen (Netherlands) and the Belgian breeding company Hendrix Genetics, they followed for more than six months two lines of hens intended to make other hens and a line resulting from their crossing, which produces eggs for trade.
The researchers developed a kind of scale starting from the hen most sensitive to disturbances, the slowest to recover from an infection, to the one that performed best on these two criteria. And by analyzing these “super hens”, they have established that 10% of their powers are of genetic origin, they can inherit them.
Man can therefore “make” them by crossing the right hens. This is the observation of Nicolas Bédère, the geneticist who conducted this study for INRAe: “If the animals are programmed to be more resistant and to recover more quickly after an infection, we need less energy, and that gives less work to the breeder. For example in the case of avian flu, he does not have no need to confine his hens. Same thing in the event of a heat wave, it is the weak point of the hens, they cannot stand the heat. By selecting suitable hens, the breeder will not need to install misters”. With this method of selection we therefore win on all counts, we obtain more eggs by spending less energy.