1. Pit Fowl Game Rooster Auction

What's a Strain? A little note about Game fowl history: all game fowl breeds are of man made designs that first stem from the Wild Red Jungle Fowl of Southeast Asia. Although, through selective breeding, we now have the birds you see today. A strain is a family of birds that have the same physical characteristics and easily recognizable traits that make them different towards the others in their breed, and they must also have the ability to reproduce themselves to be considered a true strain. Creating a strain is the result of one man's vision. It is developed through the practice of selective breeding, for many generations with a single family.

The way to know if you have a true strain is when another cocker comes to visit your yard and easily recognize a bird that has come from your brood fowl or the breeder from whom you received them from. The Breeding Plan. As in making any other type of goal, you would first make a list of steps in order to accomplish your goal successfully. Well creating your own breed is a goal. Actually, it's a very long-term goal. In fact, the best breeders in the world have been breeding and maintaining the same family of birds for thirty to fifty years, never adding out-side blood of any kind. To develop and maintain your own strain could take as many as five to ten years.

Pit Fowl Game Rooster Auction

What's a Strain? A little note about Game fowl history: all game fowl breeds are of man made designs that first stem from the Wild Red Jungle Fowl of Southeast Asia. Nov 07, 2009 by Ed 'Fulldrop' Piper (1956) Members of the cocking fraternity have used all types and variations of types, of breeding systems. Most of them will give a. These six keys allowed the cockers to be greatly successful at the art of breeding game fowl. Matings of line breeding. When using the clan system the.

My dad says that it can take five years just to see if your going in the right direction and ten years to establish and set that strain to where it's considered a true family strain. So stick with your plan and be patient, as long as you have good solid brood fowl and select potential brood fowl properly you'll do great! Once you set yourself a long-range goal, break it down into short-term goals. Set your own quality line. If a bird falls below that line, don't breed to it, cull that bird, and every year raise your line a notch higher. Concentrate on one trait at a time, but be careful not to shut out the other traits that you have worked so hard to perfect.

Although, not all improvements are from good inheritance, sometimes it's from good management and other times it's purely from a favorable accident. Don't be afraid to take advantage of something that works in your favor. Breeding Techniques. The first thing to consider when taking on the job of a breeder of fine quality game fowl, is to specialize in one or two breeds at the most.

It's too hard to raise a large number of different families and be successful. There is so much to know genetically about every breed that branching out too widely will weaken your efforts. The best have tried, and failed! So how do you maintain and improve your family for years to come? Well its done by Line-breeding, Inbreeding, Out-crossing, Semi-out crossing and Infusion.

These terms may sound confusing, but actually it's a pretty simple concept. Line breeding is the most common form of maintaining a strain. This is when a Cock is bred to his mother, grandmother or even his great-grand mother. And a pullet is bred to her father, grandfather or her great-grand father. Breeding to their aunts and uncles or even to their cousins will work too. This is all considered Line-breeding.

By breeding within its own bloodline and concentrating the genes, the offspring will eventually become predictable. After the third year, your successes as well as your failures can be seen, when both desired and undesired traits become concentrated. This is when your patience has to take control, because this is the time when the inexperienced breeders are most likely to get discouraged and quit. It's good to start with the best cock and four best hens available. Then use each hen as its own line. The more you separate the lines in each family, the less you will become discouraged. This will also increase your chances that at least one line will become successful.

This way if family #1 fails, you can fall back on family #2, #3,or #4. Most beginners fall on their faces because they fail to establish more than one line.

They tend to breed themselves right into a corner. Eventually they have nowhere to go and the family is ruined! Inbreeding is the breeding of brother to sister. It's probably the closest of all the breeding techniques.

I believe that you can maintain a strain with out breeding this close. You must avoid the practice of inbreeding because it brings out many of the weaknesses that they may carry from past generations. Such as birds that are smaller in size, shorter in station, they may have many different color variations as well. Then there is an issue of their mental and physical well-being such as health. These are birds that are always sickly, or have bad temperament, and lack the most valuable asset we cockers depend on, gameness!

Once its gone, that's it, it's gone. Not to mention many other defects that I haven't even listed. This is a phenomenon called 'Inbreeding Depression.' Inbreeding itself does not cause these problems. The problem is that it accentuates any tendency toward them by concentrating the genes. To reduce the effects of 'Inbreeding Depression,' you must avoid breeding brother to sister. Instead, breed to their parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles or even to their cousins will work.

Inbreeding does have its place though, for instance, when starting your own strain. By inbreeding and with the proper use of selection you can accentuate and lock in those good genes. But this is a whole other subject. I plan to talk more about this subject, and in greater detail, but at a later date. Out-Crossing is when you bring in new blood. There are many reasons to out-cross, for example: Improving the general health of your flock; lack of improvement in your present breeding program, which is an indication that your birds are simply lacking the right genes. Probably the most common reason to out-cross is to produce battle-cocks.

This type of breeding can be an advantage as well as a disadvantage. Although out-crossing can improve health, appearance, performance, etc. It can also bring in new weaknesses that you didn't even know were there. When you bring in new blood, you may not see the changes your looking for until the second or third generation.

So until then, you are taking a big risk of introducing new weaknesses into an otherwise good family. The hazard can easily be minimized by out-crossing your strain with distantly related birds. This is called a 'semi-out-cross.' A semi-out-cross is extremely important if you want to improve body type. Since confirmation cannot be improved by out-crossing, this is just another reason to establish more than one line of the same family. You can maintain the same family for thirty or more years by infusing blood from one of the other lines every few years or so. To further reduce the risks of out-crossing, select new blood from a strain that isn't deficient in any of the properties you have been working on and make sure that they have been properly inbred.

Hybrid Vigor. The main reason for out-crossing is to establish a high degree of 'Hybrid Vigor,' which is the opposite of 'Inbreeding Depression.' To breed an individual that is bigger, better, faster, stronger, smarter, and gamer than his parents, is in fact the result of hybrid vigor. Hence the 'Battle-Cross' or 'Battle-Cock.' To realize the greatest benefits of hybrid vigor you must maintain a high degree of heterozygosity by continually out-crossing or semi-out-crossing. This will involve the constant search for new blood. If you are deciding to create homozygosity through inbreeding or heterozygosity through cross-breeding, consider these two points; how important is predictability to your breeding program?

Do you want to hide the birds genetic weaknesses and hope that they will never show up, or do you want to force them to the surface so that you can cull or eliminate them? If a fertilized egg receives sex chromosome from both, the cock and the hen, it will hatch to be a stag. But if the egg only has a sex chromosome from the cock, it will hatch out to be a pullet. The sex determination really depends on the hen. So don't blame the cock if you hatch out all pullets. Since the hen doesn't give the pullets her sex chromosomes, the pullet does not receive any genetic information from the hen, NONE! However, the stag receives all the genetic information.

When a hen with a certain sex-linked trait is bred to a cock without it, the stags rather than the pullets receive it. Since all the pullets are like their fathers and the stags are like their mothers, this is called 'criss-cross inheritance.' This allows the sex-linked sorting of chicks according to such things as their leg color. In order to understand breeding, you have to know a little about genes. So what exactly is a gene? It is the hereditary unit that transmits characteristics from parents to offspring. Each chick receives two genes, one from its mother and one from its father.

The two genes match up into pairs of like function. For example, controlling the type of comb (pea or straight) and color, whether it is the feathers or the legs. If the paired genes are identical, they are called homozygous (a Greek word meaning 'same pair.' ) The closer they're related, and the more inbred the birds are, the more homozygous they will be and the more predictable their offspring will be.

When genes are paired different, they are called heterozygous (a Greek word meaning 'different pair'). When heterozygous chickens are bred, or out-crossed, their offspring are unpredictable. The genes of this offspring can pair off in all different directions as well as produce many combinations.

So be careful when bringing in new blood, you might not like what you get! When a cock and a hen are bred, the cocks sperm travels to the oviduct, its mission is to fertilize the egg. If the hen has laid an egg shortly before the breeding has taken place, most likely this breeding will be successful. The average duration of fertility is about ten days. However, if you switch cocks, the new cock rather than the old one will most likely fertilize the egg.

It is for this reason I like to wait until the sixth egg has been laid before collecting eggs from the new cock. To be sure that the eggs are fertilized by the new cock, you might want to wait at least two weeks before you start collect them for hatching. There are many possible reasons for a lower fertility rate, such as. The Proper Age of Brood Fowl. A much-debated question among many cockers is whether or not it's better to hatch eggs from hens that are older or younger than two years.

If your goal is to improve your health and vigor for future generations, hatch from older hens. Two-year-old hens that are laying well, must be relatively disease resistant and are likely to pass that resistance to their offspring. Furthermore, older birds tend to be the more valuable breeders. They have proven their ability to pass desirable traits along to their offspring (less desirable breeders having long since been culled). Although four to six years is usually the limit for most hens.

Any longer could be pushing it. But most importantly, always keep youth to one side of the breeding, such as an older cock with a pullet or a stag with an older hen. What's a Pedigree. To pedigree is to keep track of each chicks ancestry by keeping good records, giving each brood cock or brood hen its own identification code, and marking each of their chicks with the identity of the breeding that produced it. First, with toe punching and the marking of their nose, then later with wing and leg bands. Using these types of identification products and keeping good record books, is in fact, how you pedigree a family.

Wing bands are permanent and one size fits all. Leg bands come in many different styles, such as wrap around plastic types, adjustable aluminum, permanently sealed aluminum or brass type bands. They also come in all different colors as well. Leg bands hold information such as the birds pedigree information or the breeder’s name and address. The saying goes 'Without accurate breeding records, pedigreeing is a waste of time.' To make your breeding plan a complete success, you'll need to be very selective. Only keep your best offspring, and cull the rest.

How much you will need to cull will all depend on the quality of the offspring that you have produced. To meet your goals, you may have to cull so much that you'd be better off to scrap the entire flock and start over again. It is in your best interest to cull birds that are in bad health and are below your quality line.

Like I said earlier, you need to Cull Ruthlessly. Developing game fowl to meet your goals is a matter of BREEDING AND CULLING, it's almost that simple! I say that if you don't get anything else out of this article, just remember that! When culling out birds don't only visually inspect the birds, but manually examine each individual for skeletal irregularities or outright deformities. In all cases, cull in favor of disease resistance, body size, good temperament and extreme gameness. Feeding Breeders.

Assuming your brood fowl are healthy and free of both internal and external parasites, good nutrition is the greatest factor in promoting good fertility of your brood fowl and proper hatchability of your chicks. Poor nutrition can also interfere with your brood fowls job of producing healthy chickens. To make sure the proper protein is given, decrease their grain ration about a month before hatching season begins. Feeding brood fowl too much scratch grains or other treats are the main cause of poorly balanced rations. Periodically weigh your cocks and hens. A weight loss of over ten percent can affect reproduction also. Underfed cocks produce less semen; underfed hens don't lay as well.

To improve the success of your hatching, feed your hens a bona-fide 'Breeder Pellet.' The protein should be right around 20%. Start feeding them the 'Breeder Pellets' about two to four weeks before you intend to begin hatching. Before this, breeding was a subject I knew nothing about. I truly thought that all there was to it was to put a good cock in with a good hen. I never knew that you needed to know about genes, sex linked traits, hybrid vigor, line-breeding, inbreeding, out-crossing, culling, and the list goes on and on. Sorry we couldn't cover everything.

There is so much to know about breeding, and we only covered the basics. As you can see, the subject of breeding would have taken up the whole website. And for all of you cockers who have been doing this for a long time, and are successful at it, I think you're extremely gifted. Breeding champion cocks is truly an art form. Willem, a lot of good information. I'm sure you know what I'm going to say next. The whole Sammie 'Little Girl Cocker' And My Dad 'Kenny Troiano' is based in what I believe is a false premise, that all of today's domestic chickens, and especially the fighting breeds, come from the red jungle fowl.

Most of today's information can support this theory, but there are always new facts coming to light that challenge this view. While there is still a long ways to go to get to the truth of whether or not this theory is accurate, I believe it is not.

It is also true that all of today's strains are by man's design, but again, I reject the notion inferred in this work, that the fighting cock was not the original ancestor of all of today's strains. Uncle, the article on this post gives excellent advice.

The portion about inbreeding and Inbreeding Depression is very well done. What was left out, is that with extreme care, you can also concentrate the good traits of your bloodline. The trick is to recognize and breed only the offspring that have the qualities you are looking for. As mentioned in the article, especially if you have birds with unknown and unwanted traits and variations, they will pop up, so you must cull any birds which show any deviation that is not desirable, regardless of how great their other traits may be. If you do not, you will ruin your bloodline. I know breeders that have bred brother/sister for 10 generations or more and through strict culling, have never had a problem.

On my part, I have done also a brother and sister mating for the purpose of concentrating the good genes of the black which I prefer most. Originally, I have a shamo red hen crossed to a black small asil which I really admire and of course a winning line. Unfortunately the mating produced 1 red stag and 1 black pullet.

So I mated the two (brother & sister) and produced 4 blacks and 2 reds. All six chicks are healthy and vigorous at two months old. Out of 4 blacks, there 3 are stags and only 1 pullet. All the reds are stags. Correct me if I am wrong, if I will continue the line of the black I will only utilized the black ones for further breeding by selecting the best and cull the red ones. Actually, although they are healthy but 1 red stag has a defective beak and eye which I believe the result of inbreeding.

Robin, inbreeding will concentrate the good and the bad genes. You have chicks with a defect from this breeding.

You should already be culling them. There is no reason to keep them. They will pass on the defect even more strongly next time if allowed to breed, so cull now. Your goal is to breed the best fighting traits and the black color. Your next step is to allow the remaining chicks, without obvious defects, to mature and grow out for testing. Remember, when the chicks mature, only select the mature birds with the best physical traits which meet your standards, not only for their physical appearance, but performance as well. This is the only way that you can increase your chances of success.