The effects of rosemary and peppermint essences on performance, antioxidant status and activity of some blood enzymes of Japanese quails

This research was conducted to evaluate the effects of different levels of rosemary essence (0, 100 and 200 mg/kg) and peppermint essence (0, 100 and 200 mg/kg) on performance, antioxidant status and activity of some blood enzymes of Japanese quails. A total of 360 one-day old Japanese quails were used in a 3×3 factorial arrangement with completely randomized design consisting of 9 treatments and 4 replicates of 10 birds in each. The utilization of rosemary and peppermint essences in the diet had no significant effect on feed intake, body weight gain and feed conversion ratio in entire experimental period (P>0.05). Furthermore, the interaction of rosemary and peppermint essemces was not significant on performance parameters (P>0.05). The utilization of rosemary and peppermint essences alone or together did not have any significant effect on blood parameters including malondihylehyde and uric acid concentrations, total antioxidant capacity and also the activity of blood enzymes of Japanese quails at 35 day of age (P>0.05). In addition, the effect of rosemary and peppermint essences was not significant on breast meat color parameters including lightness (L), redness (a) and yellowness (b) (P>0.05). Generally, according to the results of this study, it seems that the consumption of rosemary and peppermint essences had no significant effect on performance, blood enzymes activity, blood peroxidant and antioxidant as well as breast meat color parameters of Japanese quails.