ceertah
Chirping
- Aug 18, 2020
- 11
- 43
- 54
Hello out there. Im not new to poultry or BYC, but i dont think i ever registered before. I have been working on small farms since 2000, so i've cared for a fair share of chickens and ducks & mute ducks. I started out on the east coast of the US, but i find myself now in my 7th year of living in a small town in rural central italy. Im starting a new garden project this year and starting out again to keep poultry. The poultry housing situations here are all in dire need of restructuring and building, so i am starting with just two chicks that i bought from a man that sells live poultry at the saturday market in town. they were labeled ''Kabir Grigio'' Grigio means grey and i assume that is the same as ''silver'' in the way we talk about feather color genetics in english. When buying them I asked the man if it was possible to select 2 females, and he confidently fished out the two most red and most feathered chicks in the box of mixed red and silver chicks. they already had enough little tail and wing feathers to have distinct colors. Then i asked him how he could tell if they were male or female, he bluntly responded ''EXPERIENCE''. Well, I got them home and happily set up and went in to see what i could find on the internet about the Kabir breed. information i find in english says they are a heavy dual purpose breed, good at foraging and are able to go broody, moderate egg laying ability (up to 200 a year) originally from the middle east...all that good stuff, I was very pleased that this was the sort of breed that i ended up with. I also read that the Kabir breed has been brought more recently to Italy and is gaining popularity here. Okay, so then i go to read about the breed in Italian and I find conflicting, confusing and concerning information on web forums...to the effect that basically all the chicks that you can buy here in commerce are ''hybrids'' with that distinction being left unclear, Some stating that the kabir is a meat hybrid like the cornish X ....that they must be butchered before 6 months or else they will suffer serious health issues... and that they can not and must not be bred, aside from the fact that none will go broody besides, that the chicks will have problems, etc etc. In my mind i consider a real hybrid being like a cornish X or like when they cross a normal domestic duck with a mute duck...the hybrid result being a bird that grows really big, really fast for meat production without a healthy, normal ability to reproduce. Two different species! when we talk about a ''hybrid'' being produced with different breeds, like for sex-linkage...i imagine that is more like human families with their eye color or skin tone or body proportions, that doesn't really fundamentally effect our health or ability to reproduce, or like Calico cats always being female. I am almost convinced that the mess that i found on the italian forum is primarily misinformation that people get from the producers of the chicks who are simply trying to protect their business...the sex-linkage techniques are guarded company secrets used to make people afraid to raise their own chickens! Its an interesting situation, it makes me so grateful that i am able to seek information on the internet in english!! I am trying to learn and piece together the facts concerning these two little red hens of the ''Kabir grigio'' label! My assumption at the moment is that they are sex-linked red as in this sites description: https://scratchcradle.wordpress.com/2012/08/05/gms6-sex-linkage/. I hope that its going to be okay for them to grow up, live in my garden as foragers and egg-layers and be allowed to hatch their own offspring with healthy results. If not, i am well capable of harvesting them before 6 months. Im concerned that I do research just looking for the information that I WANT to believe. Anyway...my favorite thing right now about raising chickens is that, bless them, they are eating the young stink bugs in the greenhouse and saving the cherry tomatoes. As soon as we get some fence put up they may continue to eat baby stink bugs and save the green beans and the okra. stink bugs are coming!!! gotta get to work!
Glad you joined. 
