Great post. A HUGE, HUGE portion of the folks at Knoxville are deeply concerned about productivity. It is a growing and influential portion of the APA membership. Walt Leonard, aka
fowlman01 and Sam Brush were kind enough to take the time to discuss this with me. The economic and production focus is indeed coming back into the Standard's perview. There will be increasing emphasis on these factors, especially as it impacts the venerable large fowl breeds.
On this farm, that emphasis was never lost.
I've chatted online with Walt and he's great. Have learned so much from him.
A shame isn't it. It's because what wins isn't always productive. Several top breeders have flat out told me that what they breed and what they show are frequently not the same. I'm stubborn... if they don't lay well they never make it to the show cages. I may not have Best in Show but hopefully they'll be competitive and by golly they'll produce or they won't make it to a show OR the breeding pens.
But it's the judges who are determining this. Some breeds, as pointed out above, can be correct and productive. But it should be all breeds across the board. This divergence of form vs function is a problem in all breeds of livestock unfortunately.
I'm a newbie to the serious breeding things, have only been doing it a few years. And of course I wanted birds that hadn't been kept very well, or by many folks, through the 20th century. So it's a big challenge to get our birds to where we want them to be. We finally have enough birds that I am not so worried if a predator gets one, that we can start doing more with our breeding. For these first few years, it has just been trying to get enough birds on the ground to have backups in case something happened, since I can't just run to the feed store and get more if some of them become part of a coyote buffet. We have seen some improvements in the pinched tail issues already. Still need to work on some other things and bring up production more both in egg laying and more meat on the breast. We have more eggs than we can use ourselves already, but we know that the birds can do better since we've seen the differences in the groups we have that came from different breeders.
Think you're right - the judges, and probably politics have played a large part in this problem of non-thrifty show birds. I was shocked to see that the APA put up a resource that said that show birds didn't lay as well. To even mention it means this is obviously a problem that is fairly well known and wide spread - yet it goes against what the SOP even says about having productive birds. Which does seem to indicate that the judges are not reading their SOP and they are placing pretty birds that aren't as productive, and so the breeders are breeding to win the judge's favor and not to have a well rounded, pretty yet utilitarian bird.
I found a reference in old literature regarding a change to the SOP for Mottled Javas that sounds like perhaps it was more about politics and making pretty birds that wrought the change in the SOP. And if that one small color change happened because of politics and personal views, it is more than likely that other changes in SOPs and in how judges evaluate the birds have also occurred for reasons not related to utility production.
I have no desire to show, but I know I need to because Javas need to be seen and they aren't shown much at all. And it would be interesting to have someone else lay eyes on our birds to see if they can offer any fresh insights to us. But I don't care for the showing that seems to be mostly about pretty birds and not a well rounded bird that looks nice but is also productive. I want my Javas to be what Javas used to be, back when the poultry literature talked about how wonderful they were as layers and as good eating, and being pretty birds that were also great for having on a farm.
