Influence of different floor types on the behavior, growth performance, and morphometric traits of male beetal kids

This research was conducted to investigate the impact of various flooring types on the behavior and growth performance of Beetal goat kids. Three types of floors: soil floor (SF), wooden slatted floor (WSF), and plastic slatted floor (PSF) were the treatments. A total of 36 male Beetal goat kids weighing 20 ± 3 kg at the age of 6–7 months were assigned at random to a particular treatment having 4 replicates of three animals each for 70 days. Data recording was applied after an adaptation of 10 days in their respective treatments. All kids were tagged, de-wormed, and vaccinated as per farm protocol. Kids were fed in their respective replicates and feed was same for all the treatments. Dry matter intake (DMI) was unaffected by the treatments (P ≥ 0.05).There is a significant difference (P ≤ 0.05) observed in body weight gain, final body weight, and average daily gain. Kids housed on PSF gained 13.27% more weight and exhibited improved ADG compared to those on WSF and SF. While initial and final morphometric measurements (chest girth, wither height, and body length) showed no significant differences among treatments, lying time, standing time, and rumination time varied significantly (P ≤ 0.05). PSF kids spent more time lying (6.15% and 11.97% higher than WSF and SF, respectively) and ruminating (11.24% and 27.41% higher than WSF and SF, respectively). In the entire research, no significant differences (P ≥ 0.05) were noted in locomotion scores, fecal scores, or body condition scores. These results suggest that plastic slatted flooring positively affects growth performance and behavior in Beetal goat kids compared to soil and wooden slatted flooring.