A Guide to Practical Breeding A Guide to Practical Breeding First edition, 2012 | Page 25

25 Our method in RB Sugbo is to double lock. We lock not only the genetic composition but also the traits of a favored individual, mostly a cock. Because at this point the father had the hulsey style that it would pass on to the pullets and the mother also had that style that it would pass on to the stags. In effect I would have created a bloodline of which both the stags and pullets should have the desired fighting style. After this critical mating, I could breed the members of the family among themselves and still maintain the fighting style. Then followed the article of Dr Bunan which said that what I wrote was possible under some circumstances, not all the time, because it could still be subject to the dominant –recessive genes action. Nonetheless, based on the discussions between the three if us, it appeared that there is some grain of truth to the theory that fighting style of the stag is inherited from the mother. This hen factor is one of the aspects we at RB Sugbo Gamefowl Technology consider in our methods of creating our triple crosses. Almost all the time we triple cross, we use a pure brood cock over two-way hens. The first, although not the compelling, reason for this is the theory that fighting style is inherited from the mother. We know that mostly crosses are better all-around fighters than pures so we hope that these ability would be inherited by the stags. Then there are practical reasons. Usually there are more crosses than pures in a gamefowl farm and in breeding we need more hens than brood cocks because a single cock may have as many as ten hens. Thus, since in breeding we need many hens it is just natural that we use crossed hens because there are more of them than pure. Another practical reason is that except for a few exceptions, as a rule crossed hens are better layers than pure. More eggs means more chicks and subsequently more stags to harvest. However, the factor that we gave the most important consideration is that because we can spar cocks we can choose a brood cock based on fighting style, something we could not do with hens. We are aware that pure individuals may either be very good or very bad in many aspects, including skills in fighting. If we use pure hens in triple crossing there is no way of telling which of the hens are skilled and which are bum when it comes to fighting ability Double lock When we desire to create a new bloodline or set a strain, we have no choice but to lock the genes at one point in our program. This is to lock and maintain the blood composition of the line, otherwise if the genetic composition would keep on changing, then no bloodline or strain would have been created. The only way to lock the genes for the first time is by brother-sister in-breeding. Our method in RB Sugbo is to double lock. We lock not only the genetic composition but also the traits of a favored individual, mostly a cock. Usually we do it by breeding an outstanding stag of an outstanding mating to its sister hereby locking the genetic composition. Then we breed back the pullets out of this mating to the father (the outstanding stag in the original mating) to lock the traits of