Re: Choosing a new breed - help please

Amy Blankenship wrote:

I'm not sure I follow. Surely the dedicated breeders such as
yourself are producing as many as they responsibly can.

We are more limited by space and weather here.

Volume is not always a good thing if all you are doing is selling 18 week
old hens to back garden homes as pets.
The qualities of the birds are never assessed and the best genes are lost to
the future gene pool.
You need to keep the hens until they are well established in their laying
cycle to be able to correctly assess her worth as a breeding bird.

Its the fact that publications give pet homes the impression that owning a
couple of hens of XXXX breed is doing somthing to help save the breed that
is so disingenous and has lead directly to the weakening of many
"endangered" breeds.

Unfortunately in the UK we have no national poultry assessment scheme and
our rare breeds organisations are worthless for poultry and waterfowl. From
the "conversations" I have had with breeders around the world, few of the
national poultry schemes are really effective or coordinated.

We are seriously thinking of cutting back the number of birds we produce to
concentrate our limited resources on having more pullets around and spending
the time and energy on much better monitoring of the birds so we can improve
the birds we have more.
If the housing is taken up by raising young birds to sell on, then they
cannot be occupied by laying birds in their first laying year.
If we can gain greater knowledge and put together only more information
about breeding schemes and results then maybe we can help others to be more
critical in their breeding and more demanding of other breeders.

Keeping poultry in the garden is the new fashionable thing to do over here
and its very unspecific nowadays. We have lost almost all the great older
generation of breeders and the bulk demand is being filled by dealers and by
breeders with little use for selection criteria. It is clear from their
descriptions that they have no idea how many eggs their birds lay, they have
never weighed a table breed, never bothered about the quality of the eggs
they set.

Breeding is never going to be always improvement -- some 'nicks' just don't
come out well but they would not know what was good or bad. Its a lucrative
bandwagon they have jumped on. And the buyers are not being advised well by
publications to allow them to be more critical of what they are buying. If I
had a pound for every time I have heard "just" in relation to what folks
want I would be really rich. "I just want good laying ###### fill in pure
breed of choice"
Few poultry keepers are interested or are in a position to breed. Thats
fine. But we have long lost the producers who were breeding from a 1000 bird
flock which were trap nested and recorded.


--

regards
Jill Bowis

Pure bred utility chickens and ducks
Housing; Equipment, Books, Videos, Gifts
Herbaceous; Herb and Alpine nursery
Working Holidays in Scotland
http://www.kintaline.co.uk




.

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