Breeding

[Chaos18]

For those of you who breed turkey's and chickens, how does one avoid inbreeding? Yes, the easiest solution would be to introduce "fresh" genes every now and than. Are there any other ways? I know there's a difference between line-breeding and inbreeding. I also know that usually inbreeding takes a couple generations to present itself.

 

[Egghead_Jr]

There are charts for aiding in line breeding. Just google it. They will give you an overview/ guide to maintaining a line of birds indefinitely. They show good times to introduce new blood but you don't have too, use a bird that's 90% one of the original sire and dam blood.

It takes extensive record keeping with numbered bands (wing bands or leg bands or toe punching) to keep tract of who's parent is who.

The real difference of line breeding and inbreeding to me is if a person simply allows the birds to mate and collects all the eggs to hatch or if they use single mating or trios in an educated attempt to improve the line.

An outstanding bird should be breed back into with it's offspring. This is not inbreeding per say. What your doing is trying to instill into the line the excellent traits that sire or dam possesses. Say your breeding RIR and the sire is the perfect brick shape that is the standard but your best hen/s in breeding pen are lacking in body type. You'd want to take the best pullets of this mating and put them back under their sire to improve the body type of the entire flock. This will increase the percentage of quality birds in hatch. You'd not want to use the inferior dams in a second mating. Then the cockerels of this mating would be culled down to a few breeders that would be used for the third generation with the offspring of second generation.

Line breeding is to improve or maintain a line with the attributes that breed possesses. With good record keeping, a keen eye and judicial culling this can be achieved for decades without ill effect (inbreeding). What will happen if not maintaining enough diversity with record keeping of parent lineage is hatch rates will go down and the over all vigor of birds will decline.