Breeding Chickens

[ChickonLand]

I have a question about genes and breeding a rooster with hens. This may take a little time to explain. Here is goes!

I have 9 hens from a feed store. They grew up and I let one of my BRs hatch 5 eggs from a family friend who has two Roosters, an Araucana and Dominque. Out of the five eggs, two are roosters. A Leghorn Dom cross and a Delaware Araucana cross. The other three are hens: a leghorn, silkie, and partridge rock. Is it okay for my to breed my roos with the three chicks for new babies in the spring since they may have the same father/rooster?

 

[LilJoe]

You can breed half siblings for up to 3 generations and siblings once

 

[Egghead_Jr]

No worries at all. Line breeding and inbreeding are not the same thing. Here's a chart on line breeding:

Note the lineage of sons back to mothers and aunts and so on. Where inbreeding comes in is if you take similar genetic birds and continue to mate them and their offspring back to them. Say you had a flock that genetically looked only like groups 6, 9 and 13 on chart and continued to mate them....that's too close of genetics and inbreeding. Over many generations of that inbreeding your flocks vigor will decline, hatchability of eggs lower and so on.