Understood loud and clear. I love animals but meat chickens are for meat and layers are for eggs and eventually need to be used as meat. Waste not want not. I just hate the idea that they often times are thought of as something as disposable as a paper towel.
The corporate world, you are needed until you are not.
By the way, what are the letters WG and WGxR standing for? I am not familiar with those chickens. Thanks in advance. Sometimes I am a bit slow.
WG is White Giant, R is for Rock, It was White Giant x White Rock back when cornish cross was still taking a hold on the meat bird industry. Delaware x New Hampshire = Indian River birds for meat back some years ago. Another lettering is AG for American Game. I G is for Indrio Gigante. I so want to cross an IG roo to WG hens. Like what the thread poster ask about there are all kinds of options using standard breeds for good meat bird crosses that want die if they get to much feed or aren't processed before they start having heart attacks.
Thank you for decoding that for me. I agree, you can make any type of chicken you want with standard breeds, all the big meat birds including the Cornish X came from standard breeds. I believe that you could take just one large standard breed, and in a few years, increase the size of the birds by perhaps 50% or more, and I believe that the procedure to archive that, would be to keep individual birds in cages, and feed them all the same amount of feed, and water, and see which ones put on the most weight after a few months (before they start to lay), that way you can physically see which birds have a more efficient feed to meat conversion ratio, and then focus on those for reproduction, and repeat the same process with the off springs, and after several generations, you might get a Cornish X
Certain types of fish (tilapia and catfish) have a very efficient feed to meat conversion ratio (2:1, or two pounds of feed gets converted into one pound of flesh) and I was thinking, that someone with a large pond could build floating cages with either chickens or ducks, and as the birds poop, and waste some of the feed, the fish below could benefit from that, creating an almost free second source of food for the property owner. That is something I have wanted to do for a while (the pond + fish + birds combo). Others have used pigs floating cages above the pond and the pig's waste fed the fish.
I think that it is tilapia that feed on pig manure. That was shown on the evening news some years ago. Tilapia ponds down hill from large pig barns. Manure flowing down hill to feed the fish.
It would work with tilapia or catfish. Tilapia can only be raised in tropical or subtropical areas, while catfish can tolerate colder temperatures as well as hot climates. In Africa they raise catfish in home made brick and concrete tubs basically, they tolerate and survive in waters with very low oxygen levels, because they can breath the oxygen directly from the air, but of course that is not ideal, specially for consumption, but people have to do whatever to survive sometimes.
Yeah, I'm gonna agree with you. Mine are now 6m old. I only had 3 male and 2 female. Processed 2 males that were terrified of me, and kept the one that was less terrified of me - he's okay at the moment. The large female is pecky but slow (that helps the others run away), and the smaller female is okay, but I don't want to breed her if we can avoid it as she's too small. I only kept her as a backup since the large female is not a great layer.
I just wanted to say thanks for you additions to the thread. My husband recently requested to raise meatier birds than our speckled sussex crosses (our main flock was purposed for pretty egg colors and pretty birds, with my choosing speckled sussex as a dual purpose and pretty bird). Someone in a facebook post mentioned breeding RIR rooster with barred rock hens, and it made me wonder about breeding what you just mentioned as that's the same ratio recommended for meat rabbit hybrid vigor. So it's nice to read someone actually achieving that.
