Quote: First: I am more than happy that GFF imports european breeds. We in Europe lost so many wounderful livestock breeds in the last decades, it's a shame. If some breeds can make it to the Amerikas and finde new friends, no matter if they breed for fun, show or produktion, I am happy for that breed b/c every year it get's harder to keep your chickens here,
Secound: The backyard breeder.... Well til the late 19th century all breeds where backyard or farmyard breeds. Historically, clubs. standards and shows are rather a sign of the emerging middle class and a growing self-confidence of the ordinary citizens, than a necessary tool for the development and maintenance of a breed. While many breeds owe their survival to the show-breeders, we should be critical about shows. Standards can be interpreted differently and not all breeds have benefited from being popular at shows and with show breeders.
Particularly evident is the "dark side of the shows" in pet breeds. Many former working dog breeds were bred to handsome medical emergencies in a very short time under maximum cash outlay by show breeders. And unfortunatly some of our heritage chicken breeds are in danger of going down that road, too.
Therefore, I would like to say at this point that a beautiful chicken is always a healthy, balanced animal- Joie de vivre, that is beautiful, Colours and such are secound-rate at best.
The breeding for show.... if you ever bred for show you know what it means. You raise 100+ chicks to get 5 excellent birds. In a good year you may get 10 or 15 really good birds out of the hundert chicks. No show breeder I know has room for the 80+ birds, maybe they can sell 10 or 20 that are on the brink to show bird to hobbists but most of the chicks not only get culled they get killed at a very young age.
Something I am not very fond of, so I stay a backyard breeder with a occasional show bird and many, many happy, healthy not-that-good-birds.
So if you buy a pullet from a show breeder you by one of the 10 or 20 good birds that will not earn a ribbon but have no real mistakes and at a show breeders yard you will only see those and the show birds b/c all other bird just don't make it to the pullet age.
Correct me if I am wrong, Stone, but even with excellent breeding pair most of the offsprings would never make it into the champions league of the chicken shows and when GFF sells one-day-old chickens they just can not sort out the non-champions. Even some more serious mistakes are not visible in a day-old-chick and so sometimes the chick may not develop into the stunning bird it should be.
As long as you breed unrelated birds you have to deal with the gauss curve, so i would be much more suspicious if all birds would have the same quality b/c given that you can't sort out at that age, i would presume that we had a case of havy inbreeding.
