Let me start by saying I am a breed purist thru and thru and very disturbed by the large number of posts and pictures about unkown crossbred, or suspect lineage birds. I spent 25 years in the pet Industry, first as an aquarium fish importer/wholesaler, then at a family owned group of stores, as a manager/buyer, next an on the road salesman for an international pet supplier and finally at a nationaly published magazine. So I've seen just about every aboration of crossbred junk animal and fish out there. Through all this I helped start the Circle City Aquarium Club in 1989 and have bred over 100 species of Cichlids and published 4 articles on breeding and thier genetics. I started in poultry at 14 in 4H and FFA and did quite well with Aruacanas before the breed was butchered by people who crossed them nearly into extiction and most recently got back into chickens, basicaly for my 10 year old son as a 4H project. At 17 I started in with fish and was, pardon the pun, hooked. All this has taught me a couple things about animal husbandry. First, keep the breeds pure and the gene pool diversified because continued inbreeding quickly deminishes the strength of your stock and produces genetic fade and mutation. Second don't dump your junk an another person. The next thing is there is always way more liers than those who tell the truth, the only people you can trust are those you have known a very, very long time. The suggestions I've seen about buying from those who have been around for a long time is usually a bad one, because they are last to turn loose of good stock, that they have worked years to produce, however most of the time they will give you good advice and maybe sell you some of thier chicks, but keep in mind they will allways keep the best for themselves. Also if you by from someone you don't know you can't ever trust what the breeding stock was unless you can go to thier place and see how the parents look and are kept. Remember there is money to be made by winning shows, so if its a winning line of birds they most likely have 3 or 4 lines going at once, which makes it hard to ensure your getting that same line instead of the line that isn't winning. Then there are those clowns that purposely crossbreed thier stock trying develope some new variety and dump them on an unsuspecting buyer, thats how the Ameruacana debocal got started. Not quite a clown, but still irresponsible, are those people who throw everything in together and have thier offspring for sale and have no clue what bred with what, but sell them as a named breed, again buyer beware. It's a shame that there isn't a registry of beeding lines like ARBA has for controlling rabbit breeders for the APA breeds, because there are way too many breeds of poultry listed under the designations of watch, threatened or critical. I believe there are now over 45 breeds of chickens now on the ALBC's top 3 priority lists, mostly from the poor husbandry practices of not keeping those breeds pure. I found the joining a local club does help with fixing a lot of these issues, first you make friends with people of like interests, next you quickly find out who the liers, clowns and irresponsible breeders are. Its usually a good idea to get hooked up with organizations like the APA, ALBC, 4H, FFA and your local university's extentions office for more or less unbiased advice for locating breeding stock. My advice is do some good research on a couple of breeds your interested in, buy 6 or 8 straight run chicks from two differant breeders from two differant geographical locations, raise them to adults and choose the best 2 Cocks and best 4 Hens (1C and 2H from each group) and breed the Hens with the other groups Cock and see how the chicks turn out. It's a two year wait for your results, but thats the best way to achieve success. Also I would really like to see BYC get behind a breed purity program of some kind and strongly discourage or even ban all mutts.
