Genetic and Environmental Factors Affecting Size of Body and Body Parts of Turkeys

BODY measurements of turkeys have been used to describe their conformation but, in many cases, the actual relationships between these measurements and the amount of flesh on different parts of the carcass have been undetermined. The objectives of some selection programs with turkeys have been somewhat illdefined in that they have not made it clear whether the ideal was a pleasing conformation, a relatively large amount of meat, or both. The actual correspondence between body measurements and the amount of flesh on the carcass can only be determined by studies of correlations between them. Such studies have been conducted on the phenotypic level with turkeys by Asmundson and Lerner (1940) and Berg and Shoffner (1954) and with chicken broilers by Frischknecht and Jull (1946), Blow and Glazener (1952) and Newell and Godfrey (1954), among others. Jaap, Renard and Buckingham (1950) have shown that strains of chickens vary in percentages of . . .