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Clearly, chickens don't work that way -- but maybe they should!!!!
Ok, maybe I don't have my thinking cap on today, but how do they not "work that way"? All pure dog breeds got to be what they are by having different breeds crossed together to make something new. Same as we do with chickens. Take the "puggle" for example. You breed a pug and a beagle, you get a puggle, it's something new and different, it's no longer a pug or a beagle. And it's a "mix" until the AKC decides to accept it. If you decide to make a new breed of chicken, you have a "mix" of 2 other breeds until the APA decides that it breeds true enough and enough people are breeding it to call it a new breed name. So, yeah, I'm not getting how that's different...
Making a new breed is NOT as simple as crossing "a Pug and a Beagle" and waiting until the AKC accepts it. It involves a group of people taking Pugs and Beagles with certain traits they wish to promote and combine and arriving at the "Puggle" they wish to promote. Those folks form a "Puggle Society" and make rules about breed objectives; what they wish the breed to be. They then spend a great deal of time and money rigorously safeguarding THEIR rules, breeding carefully, only specific animals, and arriving at the "Puggle" they want. That breed society then presents their case and their best representives to the AKC for acceptance - who also has very strict rules about what a "breed" needs to be.
The Ameraucana people are obviously attempting to do the same thing - breed and produce a VERY specific type of chicken. Unfortunately, with chickens, because there aren't any official societies or governing bodies it can't be and isn't policed and anyone can and does refer to their coloured egg laying bird as "Ameraucana".
It takes less than two months to produce dogs and cats and yet those breeders go to all the trouble of keeping rigourous records about blood lines and registering their dogs and cats. But the point of paperwork is not just about how long it takes to create the animal, it is rather more about how long that animal can produce offspring. It takes three weeks to produce a chicken. And that chicken likely has a useful productive breeding life of 2 or 3 years. Surely it would be possible to generate "papers" to track the blood lines if people were truly interested. And yes, the cost would increase significantly. But if folks want to establish and protect PURE chicken bloodlines - and stop all the false claims from the wannabees, then surely the real thing has to be documented.
