brother/sister mating ok?

[dangerouschicken]

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Those are some gorgeous eggs in that userpic of yours, too!

 

[Clay In Iowa]

Funny thing Wynette, is even after reading several articles about line breeding. I'll STILL have a hard shaking all those years of research and how breeding related individuals is a very bad thing.

 

[Wynette]

OH, Dangerous...you're gonna say something like that and not post a pic???

 

[PurpleChicken]

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We crossed Cuckoo Marans with Buff Orps. You should see those suckers!

Hey Purple Chicken, your Silkies at my house are getting BIG!

Awesome to see ya DC!! I hope the girls are enoying them. Some
of those eggs may have been bother/sister or father/daughter.

 

[patandchickens]

Ok, we were through allllll of this a couple months ago, but to summarize two important points not yet mentioned here:

1) line breeding is not uncommon in plenty o' other domestic animals besides chickens.

2) A parent and offspring are EXACTLY as related as a brother and sister are. That is, parent-offspring mating is exactly as "inbreeding-y" as brother-sister mating.

It is true that parent-offspring matings are used much more often (in ANY domestic animal breeding programs, not just poultry) than brother-sister, but not because of a difference in inbreeding coefficient. The usual reason is simply that you know (well ok, can make a much more astute informed guess about) what genes a parent carries than a sibling, simply because the parent has been around longer, reached full maturity, and often been progeny-tested in previous matings. Whereas a sibling you're less likely to have a good idea what genetics its carrying.

But, repeat, parent-offpsring matings are *exactly* the same degree of inbreeding as brother-sister.

The more you outcross, the harder it is to accentuate and 'perfect' the traits you want, but the less likely you are to get individuals displaying really defective traits.

The more you linebreed rather than outcross, the more you accentuate ALL traits, both good and bad -- which means more significantly-not-what-you-wanted individuals to be culled, but OTOH forcing recessive traits to 'surface' allows you to cull out carriers of those alleles and thus have some possibility of eliminating them from your population altogether.

At *some* point you tend to need some outside blood -- preferably not too outside, like from a closely related line -- as fertility begins to drop or recessive problems that you can't conveniently cull out begin to surface. But that may not be for some generations, and doesn't necessarily require *much* fresh blood to correct.


Pat

 

[Wynette]

Wow, Pat, what an excellent explanation, that even I could understand!


I thinks I recall (but could be mistaken) that what Bev Davis does is, for example, from one hatch, separate the 2 best cockerels into separate pens. LIne breed down from them (breeding daughters and granddaughters back to father). Then, when "new" blood is needed, pull granddaughters from pen #2 and breed them back to the father in pen #1. I guess it would make them "less" related somehow? I could be wrong on this, and I'm not sure if this would still be considered "line breeding" or not.

 

[dickiebird]

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WOW!!! Sounds just like Judge Judy!!!

 

[patandchickens]

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Yup. Look up an old (or for that matter maybe new, I just haven't seen any myself so can't say

) book on poultry breeding. They give all sorts of carefully-worked-out schemes where you keep several parallel lines going at once and then every N generations you swap a cock from one to the other to refresh the gene pool so to speak.

(I am not talking about breeding separately for show pullets and show cockerels, that's completely different).

Pat

 

[redhen]

i think in Arkansas its legal.....

 

[B. Saffles Farms]

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