Influence of the provision of natural light and straw bales on activity levels and leg health in commercial broiler chickens.

The aim of this study was to assess the effect of natural light and straw bales on activity levels and leg health in commercial broiler chickens. Houses containing ∼23 000 broiler chickens were assigned to one of four treatments in a 2 × 2 factorial design. Treatments involved two levels of access to natural light (NL) (present '+NL', or absent '-NL') and two levels of access to straw bales (SB) (present (30/house) '+SB', or absent '-SB'). All houses were windowed and artificially lit, and windows were shuttered where appropriate. Treatments were applied in one of the two houses on each of the two farms, and were replicated over four production cycles. Behaviour was observed in 2 to 6 weeks of the cycle. This involved observations of general behaviour and activity, gait scores (0 (perfect) to 5 (unable to walk)) and latency to lie (measured in seconds from encouraging a bird to stand). Production performance and environmental parameters were also measured. Average daytime light intensity and UV levels in the +NL treatment were 85.2 lx and 3.37 μW/cm2, respectively, and in the -NL treatment were 11.4 lx and 0 μW/cm2, respectively. Litter moisture levels were lower with NL treatment (P < 0.05), but were not affected by SB (P > 0.05). The percentage of time spent lying was significantly reduced by the provision of NL (P < 0.01), but not by SB (P > 0.05). There were three-way interactions between NL, SB and bird age on the percentage of time spent in locomotion (P < 0.05) and idling (P < 0.05). Both treatment factors had inconsistent effects on these parameters across different weeks. Levels of preening, resting and aggressive behaviour were not affected by treatment (P > 0.05). There was an interaction between treatments in average gait scores, with higher scores in the -NL-SB treatment than in all other treatments, and higher in the -NL+SB treatment than in the +NL treatments (P < 0.001). Average latency to lie was significantly higher with NL (P < 0.001) and SB (P < 0.05). We conclude that environmental modifications have the potential to increase activity levels and improve the leg health of commercial broilers. The light environment appears to be particularly important in this respect.