The effect of toe trimming on production characteristics of heavy turkey toms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Trimming the 3 anterior toes on both feet at day of hatch to remove the claws, reduce bird scratching, and improve carcass grades is a common practice in the turkey industry. Changes in the method of trimming and the growth potential of turkeys since the majority of research on this topic was completed motivated this study with the objective of establishing the effects of microwave toe treatment on production characteristics of tom turkeys. Turkey toms (306 in total) were either toe trimmed at the hatchery using a microwave claw processor (T) or were sham treated only (NT). Poults were randomly assigned to 1 of 9 replicate pens for each treatment. Average BW, feed consumption, and feed efficiency were determined from BW and feed intake measured by pen on d 0, 7, 21, 42, 56, 70, 91, 126, and 140. On d 140, toms were sent to a commercial processing facility where 5 carcasses from each pen were examined for scratching and other externally visible damage. Average BW was higher for NT toms on d 91, 126, and 140, with final weights of 21.70 and 21.15 kg for NT and T birds, respectively. The T birds had lower feed consumption than their NT counterparts during the first and last week of production, but feed efficiency was unaffected. Carcass scratching (T, 13.33% of carcasses scratched vs. NT, 15.56%) and other carcass damages were not affected by treatment. Although overall mortality was not affected by treatment, the incidence of mortality due to skeletal causes, especially rotated tibia, was increased in T toms. Negative effects on performance and no effect on carcass quality suggest that toe trimming may not be required or recommended for heavy tom turkeys.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".