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Actually, as luck would have it, the leading laboratory for determining the "genetic fingerprint" of a bird is only about 15 miles from Greenfire Farms. I've talked to them about genetically fingerprinting some of the rarer Orpingtons. Here's their website:
http://www.avianbiotech.com/
Right now many of the chicken breed clubs are struggling to survive because they don't offer a clear service to the poultry community. What would happen if each club ran a registry for its breed? This is how it could work. The breed club would create a panel that reviews pictures of chickens to be submitted to the registry. Each birds that conforms to the breed standard would be allowed to initially be registered. Those birds would be closed banded with a numbered band and a registration certificate would be issued. When the young from those birds are hatched and sold, they could be registered on line for free (or some minimal charge) by their new owners, and so on. Before long you'd have a database of owners and breeders and birds that conform to the breed standard. When you want to buy breeding stock, you can go on line and determine not only where to go to buy the stock, but whether the birds you buy will have a high inbreeding coefficient. And, the breed clubs would flourish because they finally have a valuable role to play in the process.
What I described is exactly what we were able to do for the red wattle hog. Greenfire Farms developed the prototype online database, and now there are 1,179 red wattles (see how precise a database can be?) registered online. You can instantly go online and draw the family tree for your hogs, and you can do a hypothetical mating between any two registered animals and determine the degree to which their young would be inbred. How cool is that?
If we do this for chickens, we will immensely improve the quality of the breeds and increase the value of the birds. And, it can be accomplished at a very reasonable cost.
Actually, as luck would have it, the leading laboratory for determining the "genetic fingerprint" of a bird is only about 15 miles from Greenfire Farms. I've talked to them about genetically fingerprinting some of the rarer Orpingtons. Here's their website:
http://www.avianbiotech.com/
Right now many of the chicken breed clubs are struggling to survive because they don't offer a clear service to the poultry community. What would happen if each club ran a registry for its breed? This is how it could work. The breed club would create a panel that reviews pictures of chickens to be submitted to the registry. Each birds that conforms to the breed standard would be allowed to initially be registered. Those birds would be closed banded with a numbered band and a registration certificate would be issued. When the young from those birds are hatched and sold, they could be registered on line for free (or some minimal charge) by their new owners, and so on. Before long you'd have a database of owners and breeders and birds that conform to the breed standard. When you want to buy breeding stock, you can go on line and determine not only where to go to buy the stock, but whether the birds you buy will have a high inbreeding coefficient. And, the breed clubs would flourish because they finally have a valuable role to play in the process.
What I described is exactly what we were able to do for the red wattle hog. Greenfire Farms developed the prototype online database, and now there are 1,179 red wattles (see how precise a database can be?) registered online. You can instantly go online and draw the family tree for your hogs, and you can do a hypothetical mating between any two registered animals and determine the degree to which their young would be inbred. How cool is that?
If we do this for chickens, we will immensely improve the quality of the breeds and increase the value of the birds. And, it can be accomplished at a very reasonable cost.