A Guide to Practical Breeding Philippine Lemons, 2012 | Page 5

The earlier fowl Hulsey brought in, that was in 1964, were mostly straight combs. They
were the roots of the batchoy lemons.
The next big batch came in 1967. They were mostly pea combs, like the 84.
It was possible that Hulsey really had strains out of these blends. But at the same time he
was also fighting triple crosses of his hatch, claret and butcher; or whatever other blood was
contained in his battle fowl. American breeders at the time were fond of the three-way rotational cross method of breeding.
A rotational three-way cross is done by employing three blood lines. Let’s say at first a
hatch and a claret were bred to produce a 2-way hatch-claret blend. Then a butcher cock was
thrown into the hatch-claret blend to produce a butcher x hatch-claret triple cross. Subsequently a hatch cock was again thrown in to increase the proportion of the hatch blood. The
following year, another claret was mated into the cross, then next year a butcher, so forth and
so on.
Breeders who desired to maintain this as a cross and not a set-strain took extra care not
to resort to inbreeding by using unrelated hatches, clarets and butchers. However, those who
desired otherwise could easily do it by resorting, at some point, to brother-sister mating or
back to pa, grandpa or other inbreeding combinations.
Possibly, too, the hulsey blend started as a triple cross, and through subsequent inbreeding, ended up a strain.
However, what Mcguiness and Hulsey did to their stock was their own.
Regardless, the fact was that the Negros breeders who first had the hulsey birds, whether
they were inbred animals or not, really went to work and employed their own inbreeding methods for purposes of setting their own strains.
Most of these breeders because they only had battle cocks or the male of the specie, used
the back-to-father method of line in-breeding.
What the different breeders had then were brood cocks of the hulsey lemon hackle variety, which, might have been not a breed or strain, but battle crosses that were not even closely
related to one another.
It was when these birds came in the hands of responsible breeders, the likes; of Freddie
Yulo, Nonoy Jalandoni, Paeng Araneta, Batchoy Alunan, Juancho Aguirre, Bob Cuenca, Tony
Trebol, Lance dela Torre, the Maravillas and the Ampils, Joe Laureño, and others that the respective lines of lemons were created — different strains of Philippine lemons.
Whether or not Hulsey really got his lemon as a strain is now immaterial. Hulsey had his
hulsey lemon, but, definitely we have got ours. Thanks to Filipino breeders who had put in so
many years of frustration, inspiration, effort, and dedication, in order to create the various Philippine lemon strains.
The Negros breeders
The brothers Freddie and Mariano Yulo were among these Negros breeders who helped
develop the lemon strains. Moreover, they were the ones credited for bringing to Negros most
of the Hulsey cocks then in the hands of the Aranetas in Manila.
The brothers who were close to the Aranetas served as the pipeline of many Negros
breeders to the hulsey fowl. They also had their own strain, the Hinigaran lemons, Hinigaran,