Mating question???????

[lollimama]

If one of four is a rooster...can it mate with siblings? What will happen if the eggs are fertilized by a sibling roo? Or what about a mother hen, will a rooster mate with it's mom? (eeeekk, creepy!!) Just wondering how to handle a small flock with a mom and three kids, at least one of whom is a boy! It's my parents flock and I know they would probably love some little chicks when the time comes but the incest issue is questionable....

 

[Ridgerunner]

There are a whole lot of threads on here about this. Don't put your morality on chickens. They are not people.

You'll find that all the different chicken breeds were created by inbreeding. You'll find that practically all prize-winning chickens at shows are created by inbreeding. Inbreeding is not necessarily a disaster.

When you mate siblings or parents with their offsprings, certain traits will be enhanced. Some of these may be good traits, some bad, depending on what your goals are and what traits the chickens have. Inbreeding is one way to identify and eliminate defective genes from your flock. Just don't breed the birds that show the defective traits or select as your keepers the ones that have the traits you want.

One thing you have to worry about is that after a few generations, you can get a lack of geentic diversity. Breeders have different ways of avoiding that, but it usually involves pretty good record keeping of who the parents are. In the kind of flock you are talking about, it would be pretty rough keeping up with this, plus you have to know what to do to take care of this potential problem. I'd suggest you bring in new chickens every three or four years, maybe just a new unrelated rooster, to keep the genetic diversity up.