Awesome, nice to meet you. My backyard is a lot like yours, but rattlesnakes in the water instead of alligators.
(The ducks won't go in unless it's freezing.) You definitely have nicer plant life too, everything here has thorns and stickers.
One other observation I’ll add is that some of the free range stags, when they’re at the verge of obtaining their adult bright plumage and large red combs, will take on feminine traits after they get beat up by the brood cock and their colors both featherwise and on their face, as well as their comb size, become subdued until their 18 month molt,
I've observed this as well with non-game breeds. Especially when the alpha roosters are related, unrelated cockerels will crow less (if at all) and take longer to mature (ass beating not required). If the alpha roosters disappear for whatever reason, one of the covert roosters will quickly "mature" and take the top spot. That's how it often works in Red Jungle Fowl too, the backup rooster is almost always related, usually a sibling of the alpha. The biggest difference is that non-game will tolerate lesser males more often than RJF or game, but if the male/female ratio is too low, even those killer silkies will take the rest out. Basic drive to pass on only the genes of the one family that you see in most species. (Females do the same, they can reject the sperm of an undesirable rooster in favor of the broodcock.)
There was a famous cocker named Mike Ratliff
I'm from near where he had his school. His son Dane passed away not long ago and I went to an auction with a bunch of the equipment. It was all going for near retail, so I only ended up with an antique poster.
If I was a betting man, I’d put my money that the game drive isn’t necessarily a lot different than the territorial drive of a red jungle fowl at the height of its hormonal cycle. Its most certainly been modified by man, but I bet it hasn’t been ridiculously so. I bet most of the modification had to do with whatever modification made chickens breed for most of the year. The changing of the breeding cycle and the sharpening of the game drive probably went hand-in-hand. In fact it is thought that chickens were domesticated for cock fighting before they were used for food, so selection for roosters that stayed aggressive most of the year could have been what drove the change in chickens to lay most of the year.
(Background stuff: RJF in the wild only brood something like 7 eggs at a time and twice a year if I remember correctly. Chickens were
first domesticated (for fighting) about 6000 B.C., and
weren't used for food until around 400 B.C.)
Yes, you're basically right, but I think maybe the other way 'round - like they put more hens in a flock because they didn't lay as many eggs back then, and only one or no roosters, because they were fighters. And they'd choose roosters and hens that were easier to handle, which eventually led to more eggs, but less reproductive vigor and survival skills. I've seen game hens hatch chicks into their teens, but we throw away battery hens and "pure" breeders after two years.
Agonistic behavior (i.e., fighting, pecking, courting, and submission) is linked to hormones and scarcity of resources (including females). More fighting between males seems to correlate to higher fertility and hatch rates, even when the frequency of successful copulation is the same as less aggressive subjects. Fighting alone doesn't determine whether only one rooster will get to survive, it seems to be the amount of chasing and whether the chased submit or not. Gamecocks are unique in that they apparently do not have the ability to submit (no one knows why yet - RJF can show submission), and that's what makes for the whole Thunderdome thing. So the girls swoon over the boys that fight for them.
What's really interesting is that studies of RJF, gamefowl, leghorns, and broilers show that broilers seem to have all their wires crossed because of what they've been bred for and are also aggressive to the hens, which doesn't happen in the other breeds. So broilers have real problems with natural reproduction, and some of the utility breeds are starting to as well (because of lack of male aggression), plus both dominant and recessive white plumage lowers fertility (commercial layers and broilers), so what you said in your video was so spot on it's crazy. No wonder most non-game breeders think that adding in new blood and hybridizing is the way to keep their fertility up, but they've really been selecting against the one thing most closely related to reproductive fitness all along.
Here's a really good
review of studies related to aggression through 2006-ish.
And I can't find it right now, but there was a study I saw that was specific to gamefowl and how they are raised (reared, handled, fed, housed, socialized, etc.) which confirmed Ratliff's philosophy - give them nothing and you get mean fighters that don't last a minute, or socialize them and give them plenty of sex and they'll have something to fight for. Again, not so different than other species, eh? (I'm sure it's one of the studies mentioned in the review I linked to, but it's time to do the nightly flock chores, so I'll have to look for it later.)
❤
