Pheasants cross breeding

Thanks... if anybody takes a good look at the history of turkeys you can see how most heritage breeds were developed by all the crossing from are fellow humans help.. with out that we would only have are wild species basically..
however natural breedings may have brought about some mutation in its self over much much more time, man just speeded things up..

Quote:
Thousands of years ago, there was an unlimited supply of junglefowl, at least so far as human kind was concerned and they intentionally crossed their domestic fowl with junglefowl so that they could readily distinguish them as it was so early on in the domestication of the primary ancestor, the Red JF, that no one could tell one stock from another. Irregardless, it took humankind literally thousands of years to breed out all the non-desirable traits of the other junglefowl species to produce domestic breeds that were useful to humankind. It has only taken a very few hundred years for humankind to extirpate most species of wild fowl that fit in this description and even less than that by unethical husbandry in aviculture. Disease is the biggest concern, failure to maintain records is a close second and hybridization is a third.

As for domestic mutations of chukar, of pheasant, peafowl, guineafowl, turkeys etc. I wish there was more impetus to maintain those lines in a pure state- for example a pedigree system. A registry should be created so that the individuals that enjoy working with these domestic breeds can better maintain their bloodlines and make more informed choices in purchasing and selective breeding, selling and so on. This is how cultivars of orchids and iris were created and maintained. Its how breeds of horses and dogs were created and are maintained. What is really counter productive is to backcross these cultivars back to the wild progenitive species.

If i worked with any of these mutations I would want to insure that no wild type mutations arose in my perfectly white chukars - for example -if I were to raise them for meat. A shoddy line would be one that someone had crossed up with a wild chukar and thrown away all those years of selective breeding to create the meat/egg chukar.

It's been so many years that this argument has been waging, decades in fact, I don't see it going away or even evolving. Perhaps the best course of action is to take the matter into our own hands- for example someone here that enjoys working with these domestic mutations can easily start a pedigree registry social networking site and take it from there. Make your hothouse flowers more valuable than wild flowers and there will never be reason for anyone to confuse the two again.

About the green peafowl. It's nothing short of intentional devastation.
One last note, it should be remembered that Jean Delacour was constantly hybridising different species because in those days they lacked any real method of discovering how they were related to one another. It is of no little interest to me that he "discovered" the Imperialist's Pheasant, which was only recently revealed to be a hybrid between two species that may or may not meet in nature.
It could be argued that:

People that work as stewards of wild captive species are conservationists. They have a great ethic and feel responsibility to that ethic. They need to live up to this by embracing more science in their passion.

People that work as stewards of heirloom domestic species should also become conservationists and develop ethics that extends to a sense of personal responsibility that reaches right over to a fellow hobbyist.