- Thread starter
- #121
Makes sense.A reason you’re probably not finding much about their history is that you’re dealing with an ancient family of birds whose original origins probably date back to the B.C. era.
I think its helpful to think of all of the oriental gamefowl as being variants of the same overall kind of bird. An aseel is a Malay is a Ganoi and so-on.
I’ll use an analogy with dogs; an English bulldog is an American bulldog is a bull mastiff is is a pit-bull terrier. Now of course those all are technically separate breeds. But they all come from the same overall bulldog source genetics and many of them have been outcrossed to other non-bulldog breeds and then crossed back to each other. Often the existent more healthy and athletic varieties have been recently outcrossed to make a dog that’s more like what the original bulldogs were 200 years ago.
There was probably a time (a very long time ago) when the various oriental gamefowl breeds were of more singular strains than what they became later. Trade in Asia was not necessarily as isolated in the ancient world as it became in modern times. There have been many empires in Asia that transcended modern political and ethnic boundaries. What a Malay was by 1900 AD may not have been what a Malay was in 1600 AD.
I would suggest thinking more about what you want your birds to be instead of what an artificial set of standards thinks they ought to be, then mine the genetics of similarly built and natured oriental gamefowl to freshen up what you have, then cull towards the traits you want.
Was hoping to find a study, or something similar to what you described.
Had the same thought of analogy as you, for awhile about the Oriental Games actually.