breeding

[MoodyChicken]

I've been told any cross except full brother to full sister is okay. But then again, other breeders have told me to breed full brothers and sisters. Depends I guess!

 

[sandspoultry]

KyleD. :

in chickens what has to go on as far as breeding and stuff, like daddy to daughter and borhter and sister...does it matter? or whats the specks of it, what will keep your flock healthy?

There are various ways people use to breed birds.

Most common is probably pen breeding- where they all just run togther and breed at will. What people do is every so often is add new blood. If you have a common breed it's easy to do.

Another way is line breeding. It's hard to clearly explain but you can do a search on it and come up with charts that show you the "family tree" so to speak

. Basicly if you take a roo and a hen and breed them together the offspring will be 50% from the roo and 50 % from the hen (that would be line A) you take another pair and do the same thing, (make line B) You can take those two lines and mix them and come out with 50% line A & B mix, 25%A to 75%B, etc and enough to make your head swim - that's where the chart come in. Anyway, you can go quite a few generations before you run into problems from breeding them to close, with that you need to mark your birds and keep carefull records.

Straight inbreeding can be a usefull tool to "lock" a trait within your flock. As others have said it can also lock a trait in you don't want.

Steve in NC​