Anyone who looked at those birds and said they were EE's should probably refrain from posting in identification threads... Clearly one of the pullets was produced from a cross with a Salmon Faverolle. The bird with the crest almost certainly has Silkie in it from the quick glance I took at it.
They are different. And that's why people pay more for them. Not because they are "elite". You may not see any value in the breed and feel the need to pay more for it and that's your right as a consumer. But just like I continue to see the value in and pay for Charmin toilet paper and not Scott tissue, I'll continue to breed pure-bred poultry and advertise them as such.
That being said, I have no problems with Easter Eggers and have had many throughout my years keeping poultry.
"Er, lets ignore for a hot minute that breeds of chickens are all nearly identical genetically."
To quote Micheal Crichton in Jurassic Park...
"He still wasn't clear about why Grant thought frog DNA was important. Wu himself didn't often distinguish one kind of DNA from another. After all, most DNA in living creatures was exactly the same. DNA was an incredibly ancient substance. Human beings, walking around in the streets of the modern world, bouncing their pink new babies, hardly stopped to think that the substance at the center of it all-the substance that began the dance of life-was a chemical almost as old as the earth itself. The DNA molecule was so old that its evolution had essentially finished more than two billion years ago. There had been little new since that time. Just a few recent combinations of the old genes-and not much of that.
When you compared the DNA of man and the DNA of a lowly bacterium, you found that only about 10 percent of the strands were different. This innate conservatism of DNA emboldened Wu to use whatever DNA he wished. In making his dinosaurs, Wu had manipulated the DNA as a sculptor might clay or marble. He had created freely."
Most things are genetically very close. But I don't imagine you have any problems differentiating between an orangutan, a chimpanzee, or a human. I'd even go so far as to say you son't have a problem categorizing humans by race or ethnicity...
