A Guide to Practical Breeding A Guide to Practical Breeding First edition, 2012 | Page 34

34 We always wanted to keep them straight combs too. But we discovered that many of our good mating were between straight and pea combed parents. Sometimes we resort to this because we could not sacrifice fighting performance for a trivial phenotype such as type of comb. For fighting attributes we aspire for cutting ability, speed and intelligence. Power was not of utmost importance but the blakliz also packs enough power. It is also very game because of the blue face and grey bloods. More than anything else selection is important. Particularly when we have to select among in-bred members of a family or intra-family selection. We have to know how to select. Selection is the key to success. Selecting brood cock is much like selecting a battle cock except that in selecting for breeding we also have to consider the capability of the brood cock to pass on the good traits to its offspring. A brood cock or hen that could do this is pre-potent. Prepotency is the ability of an It will help if, in individual to pass on its attributes to the next generation. We can selecting a brood have an idea of prepotency of an individual chicken if we know how this individual has been produced. There are cocks that look cock based on beautiful and fight well but they are heterozygous or not pure. They sparring or fighting look good and fight well because it so happened that the better ability, we also genes dominated the bad ones. When made to mate, it is possible take a look at the that the genes these cocks will pass on to some of their sons and skills of its full daughters will be the bad ones that were hidden in the genotype inbrothers. If the stead of the good ones that were manifested in the phenotype. Whereas a brood cock that is pure of the desirable trait, has nothing fighting styles of to throw but the good gene. This will make this individual preall the brothers are potent of the desirable characteristics, thus, it will be a valuable similar, then we brood cock. can say that these It will help if, in selecting a brood cock based on sparring or characteristics are fighting ability, we also take a look at the skills of its full brothers. fixed in the said If the full brothers approximate the skills of the potential brood cock or if the fighting styles of all the brothers are similar, then we generation and can say that these characteristics are fixed in the said generation most likely can be and most likely can be passed on to the next generation. If the passed on to the brothers fight differently from the potential brood cock, then it may next. be that the skills of the brood cock are distinct and the said brood cock has them only by chance because of favorable interactions of genes. Then chances are it will not be pre-potent for these attributes. The situation will become more complicated when selecting brood hens. Unlike the cocks, we cannot spar the hens and select based on fighting ability. We can only judge the hens by their looks. Since we cannot select hens based on its individual fighting ability, we have to rely on the collective and average fighting ability and pit performance of the family, specifically of their full brothers. For the same reasons as in the case of selecting brood cocks, select hens with full brothers that are uniformed in beauty and superb fighting skills.