A Guide to Practical Breeding Philippine Lemons, 2012 | Page 10

to his brother-in-law Bob Cuenca who had a lot of the same lemon strain- the hinigaran variety.
Mayor Juancho also gave the surviving limber necked hinigaran lemon baby stag to a
kumpadre who peddled chickens.
After a year, the mayor casually asked his kumpadre about the limber necked stag. To
his surprise, the limber neck was not only fine but indeed was a very beautiful specimen of a
cock.
They started calling it guapo. After a while they fought guapo. It won four fights practically unscathed. On its fifth win guapo was badly wounded.
Mayor Juancho, whose interest in breeding had been slowly revived, decided to breed
guapo. He bred the erstwhile limber neck to some cecil hens and some hatch hens.
He kept breeding the best pullets back to guapo, at the same time employ some brotherto-sister matings, until he was able to set the strain he called lemon guapo.
―I continued to play around with many inbreeding variations of the guapo line, always
keeping in mind absolute quality control,‖ Mayor Aguirre told this writer.
Eventually the line with the infusion of the cecil blood was discontinued because according to him the cecils tend to produce oversized offspring. (The cecils referred to were not
of Cecil Davies bloodline but a line of Duke Hulsey which Duke called as such. They were
reds with white under hackles.)
The malatuba family of the guapo
After almost forty years of playing around with the guapo bloodline, suddenly a bunch
of the present day guapos came out malatuba or pumpkin in plumage.
These pumpkins are direct decendants to a guapo lemon that had just recently died but
not before reaching the age of nine. According to mayor juancho, this particular cock became a
hennie or binabaye after its last moult.
He consulted veterinarians on the phenomenon. All they could say was that it could be a
result of altered hormone balance as brood cocks were normally pumped with hormones to induce fertility.
How about the bunch of pumpkin guapos? They could not be result of hormone imbalance. They could only be throwbacks.
The pumpkins came out of a likewise pumpkin cock that is son to the old lemon-turnedbinabaye brood cock. This pumpkin lemon broodcock could be a case of ―throwback beyond
the original.‖
The original hulsey cocks brought to the country in the sixties were not malatuba. The
throw back must be way way back to their earlier predecessors. Perhaps, somewhere along the
line long before the hatch-claret-butcher lines were blended by Duke Hulsey, any one or more
of the said bloodlines carried some pumpkin genes. I suspect it must have been the clarets.
According to the History of Game Strains (Johnson and Holcomb) in 1927, a Duryea
cock which was thrown in to contribute to the development of the claret bloodline, produced
many wonderful pumpkin cocks.
This could be the reason why Juancho’s lemon guapo is now producing pumpkin throwbacks. And, their fighting styles? Well, JGA’s pumpkin lemon guapos are the most powerful
lemons I’ve seen. And, they still fight like lemons should—smart and quick.