Dietary Effects of Increasing Levels of Pigeon Pea Meal on Rabbit Performance

Conventional feedstuffs in Nigeria are expensive, which has led to the search for cheap and locally available unconventional feeding materials. This study was therefore conducted to determine the dietary effect of roasted pigeon pea meal (RPP) on the performance of rabbits. A total of forty weaner rabbits (20 male and 20 female) Dutch × Chinchilla rabbits with an average initial weight of 725 g and between 5 and 7 weeks old, were allocated into four dietary treatments. Each treatment had ten rabbits and five replicate per treatment in a completely randomized design. The process of roasting pigeon pea seeds took 3 to 5 minutes at approximately 80 oC. The roasted pigeon pea meal (RPP) was used in formulating the diets used for rabbits. Treatment 1 (control) was maize-soybean based diet with 0% RPP while the other treatments contained 10, 20 and 30% RPP in the diets respectively. Diets were formulated to be isonitrogenous and isocaloric. The experiment lasted for five weeks during which data were recorded for feed intake and body weight. The daily feed intake ranged from 42.26 to 57.60 g; daily weight gain, 12.27 to 15.70 g; feed conversion ratio, 3.41 to 4.67 and final live weight, 1284.00 to 1434.75 g. None of these performance parameters were significantly affected by dietary treatments. It was therefore concluded that roasted pigeon pea (RPP) can successfully be included up to 30% in the ration of rabbits without adversely affecting performance.