author(s)
Asra Khurshid, Khan AA, Banday MT, Ganai AM, Khan HM, Choudhary AR, Adil S, Ashaq Manzoor, Insha Afzal and Madeeha Untoo

abstract
The study was conducted to find the appropriate level of quantitative feed restriction without affecting the performance in broiler chicken. One hundred fifty day old commercial broiler chicks were individually weighed and distributed randomly into five treatment groups of three replicates of ten chicks each. The treatment groups comprised control (T₁) without any feed restriction and T₂, T₃, T₄ and T5 with 5%, 10%, 15% and 20% feed restriction respectively. The results indicated that body weight and body weight gain decreased with increase in the level of feed restriction with significant decline for 10% feed restriction and above. Highest feed consumption was observed in control group and lowest in the group where in 20% of feed restriction was done. No significant effect (p>0.05) was however observed in the FCR of broiler chicken among all treatment groups. Highest live ability of 97.78% was observed in 15% feed restriction group while the lowest live ability was observed in ad-lib fed control group. Overall performance as indicated by taking in to consideration all the performance parameters together in form of BFEI index revealed most optimum value of 1.39 for 15% feed restricted group. Therefore it was inferred that 15% feed restriction was the optimum level of feed restriction that could be applied to broilers without affecting their overall performance.