Abstract :
This study aimed to evaluate the effect of dietary replacement of soybean (SB) with groundnut cake (GNC) on the physiochemical characteristics of Novogen cockerel humerus and femur. A total of 240 one-day-old Novogen Cockerel were used for the experiment, at the end of the brooding period, twenty birds were randomly weighed and slaughtered by severing the jugular vein with sharp knife for humerus and femur morphometric baseline data, and the remaining 220 birds were randomly allocated to four experimental diets (T1=100% SB + 0% GNC, T2= 50% SB + 50% GNG, T3= 25% SB + 75% GNC, T4= 0% SB + 100% GNC) and were fed to an equal number of replicated pens (55 birds per treatment with 11 replicates each) with ad libitum access to fresh water. The means squares show that the treatments were not significantly different for most measured physical and chemical characteristics of humerus and femur. Replicate had no significant effect on any of the humerus characteristics, but differed for some of the femur characteristics, except for the humerus circumference at P<0.05. the variations among the treatments were not significant for most humerus characteristics, except for humerus circumference that was significantly different P<0.05. There was significant difference P<0.05 observed on femur ash weight, femur ash percentage and femur organic matter percentage. Correlation between physical and chemical characteristics of humerus shows a positive correlation but not significant except for humerus organic matter which shows significant positive correlation at P<0.05. It was also revealed that correlation between humerus fresh weight and the dry weight shows significance at P≤0.01. Correlation of humerus moisture with length shows significance at P≤0.01. Correlation between Physical and Chemical Characteristics of Femur shows that correlation between femur live weight and femur fresh width and length shows significance at P≤0.05 and P≤0.01 respectively. Correlation between femur fresh weight and dry weight was significant at P≤0.01, correlation between ash weight and organic matter weight is negative and significant at P≤0.001. Finally, the obtained results shows that groundnut cake and soybean meal have similar crude protein content, but soybean meal is of superior quality due to its greater amino acid profile.