I'm a little behind in my reading, but I had to tell you how much I enjoyed this post. Thanks for sharing =)I'll tell you from whence the Beekissed came....way back when I first joined my first forum it was on beekeeping because I was really researching getting bees~which I eventually obtained, but that's another story. I had to come up with a name that went along with the forum...seemed like the right thing to do. I had a line of lip balms that I made and sold along with soaps, sugar scrubs, etc., that had beeswax as the base and the lip balms were called Beekissed because I loved the double entandre of bee/be + kissed for a lip balm...even had a little bee on the label.
Well...in the interest of simplicity with a nod towards encroaching senility, I just kept the same screen name for every forum I joined thereafter so I wouldn't have to remember all these different log in names. When I joined here it sort of worked well with chicken beaks(beeks~beekeepers refer to themselves as "beeks", which I found amusing) as well, so Beekissed~though I would never kiss a chicken's beak~seemed like it worked here also.
If I sound like some of the farmers you know it's probably because I was raised roughin' it on a homestead, lived in a two room log cabin, no utilities, carried water from a spring and fed/watered livestock before walking a mile out to the hard road to catch the bus for school(yes, it just happened to be uphill both ways...I live in WV, for heaven's sake!). I started helping to keep and butcher chickens at the age of 10(my sisters just "couldn't do it" and menfolk didn't do that where I lived) when we first moved on the land and helping skin/process deer from then also....we worked pretty much all the time to procure food for the family and lived out of the preserved food cellar all winter, so the luxury of keeping animals for pets just wasn't there.
After living like that through my formative years, you can imagine how little understanding I have of babying chickens and livestock around, with not eating them(of course you EAT them...if you don't eat them you go hungry!) and with worrying about every little aspect of their living outdoors~it's where they were born to live.
Could be why I sound like a man sometimes...I worked like a man from when I was a little girl and that hasn't changed much now that I'm an old girl.
This was the first cabin we built...in 3 wks time with chainsaws and axes for tools(no electricity there until I was well into my 20s). That's my mother. I had a hand on every log of both cabins we built...and pretty much of the firewood we had to burn. Cooked on a wood cookstove both winter and summer.
And here's the second log cabin built in the same way but in more time, years later after the land was all cleared and I was in my teens.
Now, after that totally obscure and probably unnecessary walk down memory lane, we can get back to our regularly scheduled programming!
Your guy there is handsome!
Through the goodness of KathyinMO, I have a small flock of heritage Barred Rocks, that are descendants from the birds of 100 years ago. They look exactly like the pictures and photos from the magazine, handbills, artists paintings of the early 1900's. (see photo below) A few sincere people have kept that E.B. Thompson ringlet line going.
I also have "pure" Barred Rocks from a hatchery, but they cannot be, really. It's not that they simply fall a bit short of being "show birds". It's more than that. I don't have any idea what the hatchery "breeders" have done to the lines over the past 70-80 years. Are they mutts? Did other "stuff" get mixed in? Is this just the result of "mass production breeding"? I have no idea. All I know is what I see, side by side, looking at the two kinds of birds, observing the differences between them.
My hatchery BR don't look like the heritage birds,(nor the photos of birds from 100 years ago) don't mature anything like them, nor act like them. They are indeed healthy, good laying chickens. I'm not the least bit ashamed of them and enjoy the heck out of them. But obviously, as Bob said earlier, there had to have been "forks in the road" taken in the mid 1900's and then continued on for another 60 to 70 years. After that many generations of breeding different birds? It is obvious to me that my hatchery BR and the heritage BR, carefully preserved for 100 years, are simply two different birds.
I don't know of any hatchery from one can order RIR birds even close to resembling Bob's Mohawk Reds. I know of no hatchery from which one can order, nor have I seen in observing hundreds and hundreds of BYC photos of folks' Barred Rocks (hatchery/feed store/back yard breeders) that come close to Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch Barred Rocks. Just two examples.
To me, it isn't worth getting steamed up over. It is what it is. It's water over the dam. The past 80-90 years of breeding chickens by two different groups with two different goals and this is the result we have today.
There is no question the old line is worth so much more than the hatchery birds.
I'm sorry that you are offended, but I am pretty certain I can tell you which of your birds came from a hatchery....and if the "breeder" birds don't look right I can tell you that too. Pictures are an excellent way to learn. There is a tremendous difference between hatchery stock and birds bred to the APA SOP. Hatchery birds are great for eggs.
Do your Modern Games look like this? They are probably a different color, but if the body looks like this they are purebred. It would be great to see them.
Walt
my thoughts, just eloquently worded. I COULD NOT agree more! The only thing I have to add is, then I'll hide under a chair. I don't understand showing chickens, dogs, cats, cows etc if you are over 14 years old. But that is just me. For those of you who are into it, enjoy it, make money off of it, I am genuinely happy for you. For me, it does nothing. If I have a hen in a cage, it is because she is wounded, not mortally and healing. If a rooster is in a cage it is because he attacked me, and will be prepped for dinner later.And I can tell you just which birds will be producing eggs and meat enough for my table needs and that there skinny thing in the cage isn't going to produce anything but bones and more bones.
This whole breeder snobbery vs. hatchery mutts is amusing to me and only slightly annoying...but it's more amusing than anything else. In the whole breeder world I'm sure it's important but in the real world of producing food for the family and using a flock to do so, I don't care if the bird has a blue blood certificate or if I found it in a ditch in the road where it fell off of someone's Clampett-style truck.
I'm sure y'all make money off of showing and selling breeding stock and that is important to you....but in the broad scheme of things? It matters little if the bird "looks" right according to breed standards. Does it put an egg in the nest every day in peak season? No? Then I don't care if it is descended from the first chicken on the first day of the world, it is of no use to the ordinary folk that just want to eat their eggs and then eat the bird when they no longer produce eggs.
It still gives me a chuckle when I remember my first days on this forum when I first discovered there were chicken snobs...chicken elitists!It's chickens, people!!! You eat them with noodles and a good broth, not race them in the Kentucky Derby!99.9% of the world don't care if the chicken is a blue blood aristocrat of it's breed, they just want to use them for food and a mutt tastes just as good~or better~than that bone rack covered with scanty feathers in the cage . No offense to your bird, I'm sure it's a real blue ribbon winner in it's class but it has no practical usage in the real world.
Quote: Well said.
