just wondering... WARNING contains armchair intellectualism

[v.cyr]

I would also wonder if prior to the advent of barn lighting and specalized laying breeds, if ducks in the past were seasonal layers more so than chickens. We have ducks laying 300+ eggs a year, but we also have chickens weighing 8 lbs in 8 weeks or less. When these animals were being utalized in the past, did the 300+ duck eggs a year breeds exist? The 8lbs or more chickens didn't exist till the last 40-60 years with specific breeding programs.

the growth rate study I referred to earlier put the pekins they used at 3.4kg( or roughly 7.3lbs) at eight weeks, while the chickens(referred to in the text as "developed from White Cornish and White Plymouth Rock", so a cornishX of some sort) they list at2.2kg(4.9lbs) at the same age... now they list weights up to 26 weeks on the chickens( over 5.3 kg at that point, or 11.7 lbs) so I am assuming they were using a slower growing strain( their goal was to compare the growth curves of different domestic poultry species through maturity, so I am assuming they didn't want their chicken group dropping dead from health problems halfway through... and for some reason, they only used females... not certain why, they weren't really clear on that)... but it does show that ducks have the potential to match our commercial broiler chickens in growth..

 

[silkiechicken]

Ah, didn't really read through the thread so didn't see that link. I'll have to browse through the article. I was just thinking in terms of really early times when people began to domesticate ducks and chickens for human use and people's preferences.

 

[v.cyr]

Ah, didn't really read through the thread so didn't see that link. I'll have to browse through the article. I was just thinking in terms of really early times when people began to domesticate ducks and chickens for human use and people's preferences.

that's ok.. the link wasn't there earlier... I wanted to link to it the first time I mentioned it, but I couldn't find the site then(my google-fu is weak)... so I threw the link in that last post... I will have to go back and link it now that I found it again...

 

[grawg]

If you get time read up on the history of the Aylesbury duck. It answers a lot of questions in regards to early European domestic duck production for meat. It looks like that breed was quite difficult to care for and required a specialized caste of people to raise them for market.

 

[njduck]

I had a really old farmer tell me once. He is dead now. i think he was born in the late 1890's. I assume he had never heared of some of the duck breeds we talk about, because he never mentioned them. But he always said if you wanted to maintain a duck population, you needed muscovy's. They took care of themselves and hatched alot of babies. They also hatched out 2 sets every summer. Chickens layed year round and you had to have RIR or BR with some bantam in them otherwise they wouldn't set on eggs. Then his family got electricity on the farm and a few years later got an incubator. For every 2 batches of duck eggs hatched they could hatch 3 batches of chickens. So in my pee brain it seems like feasablitity and technology set the standard.

If you think about it. You run a hatchery. If it cost the same money to hatch out 100 ducks as it cost to hatch out 150 chickens. The sale price was the same for each chick. Which 1 would you hatch out. Thus for us, we see the standard as the chicken. It may not have been that way 200 years ago.