The Heritage Rhode Island Red Site - Page 130

I hope that the HRIR's will spread to the California coast.  It would be nice to have access to the good lines out here.  Maybe I will be the first.

Quote:

Originally Posted by docdandc 

I hope that the HRIR's will spread to the California coast.  It would be nice to have access to the good lines out here.  Maybe I will be the first.

CA has a couple of the best Heritage RIR breeders in the US.

That's great news!

Do they sell them or keep them to themselves?

Ron

That's what happened resulting in 2 types of RI Reds. In the 1920s& 30s Red breeders took 2 divergent paths. Some, such as Mrs Daniels, focused solely on productivity paying little or no attention to appearance. Others focused solely on appearance paying little or no attention to productivity. As a result we were left with Reds that laid well but bore little resemblence to the Standard description & Reds that adhered to the Standard description but weren't particularly productive.

There were some breeders, Harold Tompkins comes to mind, who paid attention to both appearance & productivity but they were in the minority. Since productivity was the goal of the commercial poultry enterprises those birds bred for productivity became the dominate type available & standard bred Reds became hard to find. They have remained hard to find until fairly recently. With the new interest in heritage livestock & the slow food movement there has been new interest in several old breeds of poultry, Reds among them.

Hopefully many of these new Red breeders will pay attention to both appearance & productivily because there's no reason, with proper selection, that both can't be maintained.

Jim you hit a historic gold mind of data. I was looking at this page from Robs site.  http://chickenhistorynow.blogspot.com/p/rhode-islands.html

You can see all of the Whos Who in great pictures of what some of the birds looked like in the early days of the breed. This whole blog can give you history on breeds that we call Heritage Breeds.

What a wonderfull amount  of work he has done to put all this in a order for others to see.

The purpose of my research on where the Rhode Island Reds went down the path of no return is the 99 1/2 % of the people who have so called Rhode Island Reds today who will not give the credit or  respect and dues to the for fathers of our breed for what they did to build up this breed and how the production side of poultry in our country took this breed down the road of muts and birds that dont resemble the breed. In my view as a History  Buff its one of the worst injustice I have seen in how a name as the Rhode Island Red has been high jacked and pictures of birds used are not true to the breed. Its like reading a article on the Internet about Polled Her fords and the pictures of the female cows where half Her ford and Half Guernsey. When you write and post something you should do your home work and make sure it is authentic in words and in pictures. Today when you ask 100 people what does a Rhode Island Red look like and if you had ten pictures of them 99 percent of the people would pick out the production red and say these pictures are the what they should look like. Yet if you asked them to pick out a picture of a Chow Chow dog they would all pick the picture of the original Chow Chow and not a German Shepard-Chow Cross like I use to own.

New York Reds you said it best. Mr. Harold Tompkins was the one of many that had his birds truly dual purpose and his magic egg laying goal was about 200 eggs per pullet year and the bird could go to a show room and win in heavy competing. This is why many of the current Hall of Fame members in the Rhode Island Red Club felt he was the greatest breeder of all time for this breed. Thanks Jim hope many will save this blog and study it is a historic Poultry Gold Mine of the past. bob