Breeding/bloodline question

[diana_of_the_dunes]

I've been planning to get chickens for over a year, and it looks like it might actually happen this year (yay!). I want to get Australorps, since they are docile, good egg layers, and are heavy enough for a good meat bird. I'd like to eventually have a self-sustaining flock, assuming I can get a hen or two to go broody.

But... I'm assuming that if I get chicks from a hatchery, they might be related. Is it okay to breed them? And if I want to continue breeding the offspring, I'll need to bring in a "fresh" rooster or hen to keep them from being inbred. Right?

No chicken book or website seems to ever mention this...

Thanks in advance!

 

[rhoda_bruce]

Good choice on breed. I can understand your reasons. They might be a little late with maturity, but you will get your money's worth. Perhaps you can get your pullets from one location and get your roos, alone with broilers or guineas, ducks or the like from a completely different location, if you are concerned about the birds being related.
I read a comment on the McMurray website from one of their customers about a purchase which occured 20+ years ago of the rainbow layers...the customer claimed that they had incubated/set their eggs and had chickens with those for the 20 years and only just then needed to start over.
I think on chicken relations just a bit, but I don't worry about it much. For whatever it is worth, I did communicate with someone in regards with my araucanas and they told me that its better to have parent with child that brother to sister. It made sense by way of that it seemed that there would be less chance of having the same genes.....from both sides. Your sibs have more genes in common with you than your parents really. But you are right. Not many people talk about this subject.

 

[rhoda_bruce]

Oh.......one more thing I forgot to mention. Look at a bunch of really good coops. And what I mean by really good, is Coop Knox. Spend every penny you possibly can in the best, defensive coop you possibly can and you won't be sorry.

 

[patandchickens]

Do a 'search' for threads, in this section of BYC and also in the 'breeding, showing and genetics' section of BYC, for threads about inbreeding, sibling mating, parent-offspring mating, etc. You will find much valuable information.

Bottom line: what you get from a hatchery is probably not all THAT closely related to begin with. That said, the results of inbreeding (mainly when continued for a number of generations, not just once) are quite variable because they depend on three important things: how many deleterious recessive alleles are lurking in the gene pool you started with, how carefully you cull each generation, and how many chickens we're talking about here.

If there are a bunch of bad traits lurking in your starting stock, inbreeding can show problems within a generation or two; more often, you can go a handful of generations and then start seeing a decrease in hatchability/survivability; best-case scenario, if you start with chickens from a line that has been very carefully tended for quite a long time, there may not be a whole lot in the way of deleterious recessives in there and you may be able to go quite a while without any visible problems from (intelligently-guided) inbreeding/linebreeding.

And of course, no matter what you started with, you have to remove 'suspicious' or 'poor' individuals from the gene pool -- potentially also their offspring or even sibs, in some cases, if the trait does not show up til after maturity -- in order to keep things as tidy and on-track as possible.

The total number of chickens (kept over winter and used as breeders for the next year) matters because the fewer you hold over for breeding, the less diversity of genetics is going into the next generation. Continued inbreeding/linebreeding with a flock of 50 breeders will give you much more stable and acceptable results than continued inbreeding/linebreeding with a flock of 5.

I would suggest mainly not worrying about it until and unless you start to see problems occurring (which is often not so much "three headed chicks" type stuff as simply poor hatchability of eggs, or weak chicks); and at that point inject some new blood into the line. For a serious selection program it matters where the new blood is from; for just 'I want to have a nice flock of chickens' it can be whatever is convenient

GOod lcuk, have fun,

Pat