Study of growth models for Ankaleshwar breed of Indian native chicken

The average body weight of at day old, 8th week and 28th weeks of age were (28.97±0.53, 29.77±0.41; 442.02±14.36, 382.98±9.47), respectively in male birds and 1775.81±32.59 and 1390.44±25.93 g respectively in female birds. The males and females birds attained about 1.0 kg body weight at 14th and 18th week, respectively. The maximum average weekly weight gain for male and female were 124.70 g and 83.56 g, respectively, and it was attained at 12th weeks of age. The growth of both sexes was sigmoid, therefore the non-linear models viz. exponential, monomolecular, logistic, Gompertz, Bertalanffy and Modified logistic models were fitted to average body weights of males and females from day old to 28th week of age. On the basis of different measures of goodness of fit, the Gompertz followed by Bertalanffy models was found the best to describe the growth of male and female Ankaleshwar breed of Indian native chicken, respectively.