The present trial showed that the improvement
of breast meat yield caused by increasing arginine
took place in the starter period and suggested that dietary
arginine supplement significantly increased breast
meat yield (P < 0.05; Table 2). Breast meat yield has
been recently used as an important indicator to estimate
the amino acid requirement in ducks (Bons et al.,
2002; Xie et al., 2006, 2009) and chickens (Labadan et
al., 2001).