Being VERY new to Marans, I do appreciate this discussion.
For 44 years I bred and exhibited rabbits and while I would use the standard as my guide when breeding for improvement in a particular breed, I would indeed have a judge now and then that would select winners that did deviate from the standard in one or more areas. I actually had friends that would breed two separate types within a breed and depending on who the judge was going to be, would select one type over the other for entry if they were aware of that judge's preference.
Me...I had a small rabbitry and did not have the space to house that many rabbits, so I just focused on the standard and kept plugging along. I managed to do very well, but found I had to turn over my breeding stock quite frequently and was VERY discriminating when deciding what rabbts to keep in my breeding program. Once in a while, as an experiment, I would keep an "uglie" because of color or other genetics I wanted to expand in my breeding herd. I will say that very rarely did this work out well.
The old saying: "You've got to build the barn before you paint it" is a truism. In almost all cases, the standard will allow much more points on "Type" or body structure than it will on areas such as color. In the Marans, we also have the added importance of egg color, which cannot be determined by evaluated the bird on the show table. Conceivably you can have a gorgeous hen who has placed high in shows who has never produced a #4 egg in her life. To the dedicated Marans breeder, this hen does not qualify as a Marans at all.
I've bred and shown a number of animal species in my life, and while I'm not necessarily interested in showing at this time (I may change my mind on that), I am intensely interested in breeding toward the standard and will approach my "Marans project" pretty much as I have with the other animals in my exhibition past. Since I'm not new to poultry (just Marans), a high station bird is going to be taller - more leggier. If the Standard calls for a "medium station" bird, then we should breed toward that end.
My very first Marans cockrel (only 3 weeks old to date), appears somewhat "leggy" to me, so I'll probably look for a more compact pullet or hen to breed him to. I'm really anxious to see what the pullets I have will produce as far as egg color. I believe the best way to approach any breeding project is to view it as a challenge. I don't expect "perfection" going right out of the gate, but I will be breeding toward that end and hopefully show a steady progress towards the Standard's "ideal".
