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This year, I started weighing young birds. After 2 weighs, you can get a pretty good idea of who is gaining weight the best. I used that as a major culling factor. Another thing you can do is cull by weight in general. At 8 weeks you could cull the bottom 50%. Then at 12 or 16 you could weigh again and cull the bottom half again, this time for rate of gain. If you want to keep your culls as meat birds, you certainly can if you have the system and space. For me, one of the reasons I culled is to make more space.
A lot of people cull for comb type, # of points, etc at very early ages. With Dorkings, you can also cull for 5 toes at the incubator. Since you can also sex them, you can even decide if you want to raise more pullets than cockerels or vice versa. With a good eye, you can probably count points on combs as young as a couple days, maybe birth. Any obvious DQs like webbed feet, crossed beak, etc. will get culled basically as soon as you find them.
One big part of conformation is size. In my opinion they go hand in hand. A very small bird is not a very good one, even if it has the right tail angle, etc. And frankly, size can be gotten back, but so can type.
A lot of people say that you have to build the barn before you can paint it, speaking about the color in parti-colored birds. That's all fine as long as they keep making paint...My point is that paint and genes are not the same thing. If you sell or cull a bird that is the only carrier of a certain needed color gene in your flock, no matter how much hatching you do, you won't get that gene back. You culled the only bird that had it. The only way may be to cross-breed or color cross, which could very possibly put you back several generations more than if you would have used a slightly inferior-typed bird with excellent color. Basically, you have to very careful to build your barn, but keep all the paint you need in another shed until you can use it correctly. There are no paint stores for chicken colors.
ok thanks rudy. that does give me an idea where to start... and actually the trio i got, while i thought they weren't great quality, have improved just in the last 3 weeks, putting on more size. the roo is bigger than ever (need to buy that scale
) and fairly blocky IMO... are there other breeds with coorect conformation so i could get an idea what i'm looking for by just 'looking'? one hen, i like her feet better than the other, but the other is larger and less tapered toward the tail. but with a group of 3, i'm not culling LOL.
oh and for comb, both hens have a bit of a 'kink' in the middle of the comb, and only in the last week or so have they started growing a bit and starting to lean over (not much but a teeny bit) wondering if that kink in the comb is a defect or just the way it works to 'encourage' the flopped comb. kinda ----~--- if you get the picture? my oegb hen (same color btw) also has the same kink in hers. funny thing is, she's got a very similar body shape too, but WAY smaller than these girls. (bad quality oegb? LOL maybe i need to add her to the bantam dorking group, except she doesn't have 5 toes)
and as for 'painting the barn' what kind of color traits would you cull for? (silver grey) i see pictures all over the place but have no idea what is 'right or wrong'. tho i think my guy's nice. but he's mine. so i might be prejudiced. LOL
got a vid i did of him and the girls (and the bantams) but it was more for the "can dogs and chickens get along" question, with an example of a down stay on my 2 boys (standard poodles) that stuck even when Funky (bantam sultan with bad attitude) decided to go after 'the big guy'.
click here
