Re: Choosing a new breed - help please


"Jill" <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:13f51s5paqck5c0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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.

I don't understand how that could be, since what the "other" breeders do
shouldn't affect the quality of _your_ birds, and whether they do or do not
produce these birds that go on to pet homes shouldn't have any more impact
than if their hens laid eggs they then ate instead of hatched.

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.

Seems to me all you can do is do your own thing. You can't force other
people to keep birds the way you do. And if they do keep the birds in a
different way, you don't have to breed your birds to theirs. So from your
perspective, it would seem someone breeding badly is the same as someone not
breeding at all. And I'm not sure how this is harmful to the breed, since
presumably there are breeders like you that keep on doing their thing.

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.

Would a lack of dealers and new breeders bring back the old breeders?

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"

Well, an "ok" layer still lays eggs (is still fit for the purpose) and an
"ok" broiler still can be eaten. Is the extra gain you get by putting all
this time and money into breeding only the best greater than or equal to the
investment? If not, there is not really a _practical_ reason to do it.

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.

And you think they'll come back if such magazine articles are not
published...?

-Amy


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Relevant Pages

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