Moreover pelleting also increases the average particle size of the diet and this can affect the development of digestive organs, particularly the gizzard and intestine. In this current study, the birds fed the pelleted / crumbled CM diet had heavier and bigger gizzards (Table 5). Bigger particle size, higher feed intake, coupled with higher volume of digesta in the gizzards, of birds fed the pelleted/ crumbled CM diet may be the reason of the increase in gizzard size. This finding is consistent with the previous finding of Dahlke et al. (2003). The ratio of digesta weight in the gizzard to the digesta weight in the duodenum was 1.63, 1.93 and 2.16 for the fine ground, mixed and crumbled CM diets respectively. The quantity of digesta in the duodenum of birds fed the fine ground
CM diets was more than that of birds fed the coarser crumbled CM diet or mixed particle size diet in this current study.