Emus - can males and females from same family breed?

[megs0330]

This may be a stupid question, but I thought I read somewhere that a 'breeding' pair could be siblings or parent/child, is that true? seems odd, but I thought I would double check. We have 2 adult emus and 2 young ones that came from one of the adults. We are curious what our chances are for egg production. The father of the two young ones was killed and we have raised these young from birth (they are 6 months old now). We know we still have one adult female, but are uncertain what the other one is, and are just curious what to expect with this upcoming 'mating season'.

thanks !

 

[ES Emus]

Emus will definitely interbreed, I have a friend who started with a pair of birds, after several years of breeding together the male died, but the female continued to be bred and produce offspring from its own offspring. After a few "generations" of that, he started having trouble with the young developing leg problems. That is why we separate our pairs into unrelated bloodlines.

 

[megs0330]

Thank you so much, so it sounds okay in the short run, but not in the long run! Good to know since we don't even know if our adults are male or female (we are pretty sure one is a female) then we won't really know who is breeding with who unless we separate their pastures which we might do!

thanks again !!