For purposes of building enthusiasm for the Delaware breed, I'm encouraging people to get Delawares, any Delawares, and breed them with the Standard in mind. However, for the sake of this line, I hope more breeders commit to working to keep the line "clean" as they work to improve it and see where it goes.
I keep reading that if you cross in different lines, or even different breeds as the hatcheries likely do, then you lose stability in the way the chicks turn out. In other words you lose predictability in the result, and uniformity in the line -- you have "mutts" instead of Delawares (if by "Delaware" mean a bird that was bred from Delaware parents and is able to produce Delaware offspring, and those 3 generations of Delawares conform to the Standard for the breed). The goal is increasing stability, uniformity, and predictability ... to a point where they all look the same, and ideally that "same" would be something close to the actual Standard for the breed. I've read that takes years and years of careful inbreeding and culling to reach predictability, stability, uniformity, and quality.
All this is made slightly more complicated for Delawares where part of the standard is the utility of the breed. Delawares should be good meat birds (good-sized, tasty, meaty, not too slow to mature and even older birds should be tender and delicious) and the females should be good layers (large eggs, eggs through the winter).
What seems to be happening with the hatchery crosses (of any breed, not just Delawares) is we do get one generation of properly colored birds (ish) but with poor type, and those birds will produce less-nice-looking and more-random chicks when bred to each other. Therefore, getting stability into hatchery-bred Delawares might not be possible ... I hope it is! ... yet even if it is the type would likely not be correct for a Delaware even if the feather colors remain somewhat correct. That was the roadblock people hit (lines of Delawares that are frustratingly resistant to improvements in type, so people quickly lose enthusiasm) with the breed that has encouraged a couple of breeders to start over as Kathy did.
What makes Kathy's birds so good, I think, is that she started with really great parent stock. She made some very-well informed choices about where to source those birds, from very well preserved lines. With the hope that she'd end up with similar results to the original creator of the breed.
Hmmmm. I'm rambling.
I keep reading that "inbreeding" of chickens is less of a concern than I had thought. There is a lot of stuff going on in chicken genetics -- all from the original source material -- so if breeding isn't handled properly just about anything could result. Randomness. Instability. Birds that quickly move away from the Standard for their breed. The way I've had it explained to me, it would take about 16 years before I'll need to worry about bringing in "fresh" blood to this line ... to prevent the line from collapsing due to lack of genetic diversity. That's practically a whole "career" of breeding, especially starting at my age, so I'm not going to worry about that. Instead, I'm going to worry about keeping other breeds/lines out of my flock. And hope there are other breeders doing the same.
I don't know how many people Kathy sent boxes of F4s to, but I would hope there are still more than a handful of us working on this line without crossing other things into it. We could undo her amazing work if we aren't careful. That said, it is still a somewhat unproven line, and problems might pop up that mean the project hits an early dead end. And if we could get more people devoted to keeping this line "clean," then we'd have more sources for "fresh" blood that is potentially more predictable when we need it.
Unfortunately, sharing this line around is difficult as we need to raise the chicks to maturity (and beyond!) to make good breeding choices, there is a limit to the number of chicks we can raise, even fewer that turn out breedworthy, and many of us aren't able to ship chicks as we aren't health-certified to do so legally, and shipping adult birds is spendy and awkward. I think we'll have little geographical pockets of "Kathy's line" breeders, at least for a while. And that's a shame, but it is what it is.
So, I really hope that people who do get "Kathy's Line" birds can keep them "pure."
That said, if I had unlimited facilities and money and labor I'd be curious to cross in some of the hatchery birds, completely on the side, to see if certain improvements could be made without losing what is already so great about this line or making Mutt Soup out of it. Because I'm curious! And not always patient ...
... and also a little bit
As it is, here we can really only hope do a "good job" with one line of one breed, so that's our personal limit. We are only willing to hatch as many chicks as we can raise to maturity to use, either as table birds or as layers, so that's another limiting factor for us. We really need to get our act together when it comes to processing birds.
