Brahma Thread

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K so I'm New To Chickens And decided To Go With dark Brahma And Light Brahma But My Chicks Look A Little different From What I See here. Their 6 Weeks In This Picture
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Can vulture hocks be bred out of a bird.
Yes. It would require test matings and lots of culling though. BigM can explain it much better than I. VHs are still pretty common in bantam Darks and people have been trying to breed it out for years. The tricky part is that birds that don't show them can still carry them.

Tim
 
As Tim says vulture hocks is recessive, meaning it takes a copy from each parent for it to show itself. With only one copy the bird looks normal.

If all your breeders show vulture hocks, you're toast. A bird showing VH has two copies and can't help but pass a copy to all it's chicks. A normal looking one copy bird will still pass a copy to 50 % of it's chicks.

Breeding a VH bird to a 100% clean hocked bird will produce all normal looking one copy chicks.

Breeding these one copy birds back to each other should in theory, produce 25% two copy VH chicks, 50% normal looking one copy chicks, and 25% no copy clean chicks.

One way to distingish who, of the normal looking birds, is hiding a single copy, would be to single breed each bird to a VH bird. Any bird that produces any( should be 50%) VH chicks from this breeding, is carrying. If no VH chicks, the old bird is clean.

This is an expensive, time consuming process, requires extreme attention to detail, marking every chick, very good record keeping, and produces a bunch of chicks that have no use in future breedings. Fortunetly the 2 copy VH chicks show themselves at a few weeks of age, before a lot of feed is invested in them. If only the one copy birds gave some type of indicator, or a blood test was available, would be so much easier.
 
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OK that was a lot of help. I Have 2 Black Partridge Brahmas that so far are gorgeous but both of them have VHs. I guess they will just be eye candy. Hopefully my Blue Columbian come out better! Man I really liked those guys to.
 
See there. Told you he could explain it. Nice to see an intelligent question for a change. BTW, where does everyone get your chicken diapers? I'm starting to get tired of mine pooping on my recliner! Not sure if its a roo or a little girl, but it sure messes up my trousers.

Tim
 
See there. Told you he could explain it. Nice to see an intelligent question for a change. BTW, where does everyone get your chicken diapers? I'm starting to get tired of mine pooping on my recliner! Not sure if its a roo or a little girl, but it sure messes up my trousers.

Tim

You might be out of luck....I don't think they make them in mini Brahma sizes.
 
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