Show Off Your Games!

[Jungleexplorer]

Now... Lets get back to the gamefowl. These folks have some very good input on the birds that we are supposed to be talking about.

Ditto

 

[fowlsessed]

I'm late, but just wanted to say that as long as we keep it civil and are willing to learn, it's not arguing, it's learning - discussing.
Some good posts, and I favor Daniel's and Cuda's viewpoints, but for those of you who think otherwise> Hey, I guess there's nothing wrong with it - breeding Game breeds to non-Game breeds - BUT, call them as such, and don't think you have Gamefowl anymore. Gamefowl may have started out not being game, which is arguable (some say that they came out of the Jungles game), but they have become genetically unique, and can be "perverted", or ruined, all too easily. By poor selection and breeding. Call the crosses as such; most of you will never test your fowl to even know if they are game, so just because the "maybe's" there with the crosses, doesn't mean we should call on it. Some will come out tougher and more persistent, but the non-game will almost always come back to haunt you.
As a matter of fact, since keeping Gamefowl unique and acting - as well as looking - like Gamefowl is taken so lightly> There should be some differentiating that will need to take place, kinda like the OEGBs aren't true, miniature OEGs. Same with AGBs. As with the pigeons I used to raise, Working Horseman Thief Pouters and Show Horseman Thief Pouters. The show birds couldn't work effectively anymore and needed to be singled out.
BTW, adding Sumatra to authentic birds, just for looks really, is going to come back and "bite you in the butt." Just some friendly advice.

 

[chickletteSarge]

Game dogs? Are you referring to Am. Pit Bull, Am. Staff, or Bull Terriers which are specifically used in disscompassionate, gruesome, and illegal dog fight activities in US? Or, I should say; Conventions?

I have been a dog breeder for the last 27 years; bred and raised good number of champion dogs. I am a very active dog show exhibitor, and dog trainer.  I also have chickens, as well as, pure bred Shamo. I deeply appreciate the captivating beauty of Game Birds; admire their intelligence, and gentle disposition with people. There is a big difference between Game Birds, and Game dogs, sir!

You have made the mention of, Game Dog Champion, in your post above, and am guessing that you are most likely not referring to A.K.C. sanctioned Dog Show Champions; but, rather the Pit Champions which takes 3 undefeated fights to achieve? Grand Champion? 5 (five undefeated) fights? Well, needless to say; first they have to conform to the "19 Cajun Rules"?

You have so generously posted a training photo of your Pit dog. If he is just a family pet which one can trust with the lovely little girl in the photo, I am wondering the reasons of such a training. Actually, the photo of the pretty little girl and the Pit dog is quite frightening, and disheartening. I know dogs' nature! I have devoted big part of my life to raising, showing and training. One fact shall never change is that: when the opportunity arises, the dog will do what it was bred for,  what is in his nature, and in his genetics, regardless of how long it was trained for it to behave like a cute, perfect house pet!
Please do keep close eye on the innocent little girl, sir!

I love, and learn from the posts of the experienced, respected Game Bird breeders, and appreciate the photographs of so many gorgeous birds, and that is "THE" only reason why I am on the, Back Yard Chickens' "Show Off Your Games", thread.

Thank you!

Lual Shannon


Ok no where did I pick up anything mentioned about fighting dogs... I read the complete opposite. I hate it when people twist words to make responsible bully owners look like bad guys! How bout us get a bit educated on the subject matter before you cast stones!
My Am. Bulldog is in no way a pit, but she was bred for it! I rescued her and socialsized her properly at an early age and 10yrs later she has never bitten any of my girls who try to ride her like she was 2!
Not to mention all 53 pits taken from Vick were rejoined and are standing members of society! Only one was put down due to health issues!

Military vet and vet tech in training. I can argue all day about this but please get it off the gamefowl. Thread. I don't want the thread audited. Too many games that need to be shown to the world!

 

[cubalaya]

using gamefowl to make pretty dunghills. if they are not pure then label them for what they are. i agree with cuda and dt

 

[Jungleexplorer]

This is in response to many post and is for everyone and is not written to any one single individual.

Ultimately, what they all are called regardless of breed or mix, is "CHICKENS". It would behoove a lot of people (who take this whole issue of Gamefowl way to seriously) to remember this. Just because someone else places value on different qualities then you do, does not make their birds trash or dunghills and your birds treasures. They are, and always will be, "Chickens" and nothing more. Call your birds "The Grand Master of the World" if you want to, it is still just a chicken, and it is no better or no worse then any other chicken. If it is what you like, great! But don't try to make it seems that everyone that does not value the same aspects of a chicken that you do, somehow less or worse then you.

You have to remember that every standard that is popular today was created by someone that broke away from the model of their day to try something new. I bet these forgers of the past were also ridiculed by their peers for not following the standards of that age, what ever they were. Who knows, if one of these adventures people that are trying new things today may develop a breed will be come the talk of the town for future chicken breeders. It's like I said before, there are two kinds of breeders, "Followers" and "Forgers". Followers are those that follow the ideas that were created by someone else, and forgers are those that decide to break free from the norm and forge ahead with their own ideas. It is not wrong to be a follower or a forger. But followers must understand that they are following the ideas that were created by forgers of the past and therefore must not condemn someone else that is a forger today.

My point is this. We each are doing what we want and love to do. Let's just be respectful of each other and not try to force everyone else to fit our mold. If someone else uses the term, "Game or Gamefowl" in a manner that you personally believe is not correct, try to respect that that person may have a different interpretation of those words then you do and there is nothing wrong with that. But it is wrong to criticize and demean someone (or their birds) just because they do not not follow the same ideas you do or subscribe to the same interpretation of a word as you do.

In my opinion, I think a lot of what goes on breeding wise in this country is actually harmful (From my perspective). But this is only because I value different qualities in a chicken then probably anyone else on this forum. The qualities that I value the most in chickens have been all but obliterated in chicken breeds in this country as a result of the way Americans breed chickens. The reason I feel this way is very simple. In a nutshell, thechicken breeds that are available in this country today are all products of "Man's Selection" and not "Natural Selection". Let me explain what I mean.

I raised chickens for over 20 years in Central and South America in very remote areas as did everyone of the sustenance style farm families around me. The people I am talking about live at a level of poverty that I don't think anyone on this forum can truly relate to or even imagine. So in order for these people to raise chickens, those chickens must fulfill the "First Law of Survival" which is 'Economy of Motion" or "Conservation of Energy". The first law of survival "Economy of Motion" dictates that any endeavor worth investing precious and limited resources into, must produce more resources then it consumes. To understand this concept, try to imagine that you all have $1000 dollars and you will never get anymore. Pretend that you were deciding how to invest this money. If you invest in a stock that consistently loses value, you will eventually lose all you money and die. In order to survive, you must invest in only those stocks that will return more money then you invest in order to survive. This is the law of Economy of Motion.

So what does the law of economy of motion have to do with raising chickens with poverty stricken people? Well, if your are so poor that you can not even afford to feed your family everyday, how much money do you have to invest on buying special chicken feed? None! How much money do you have to build fancy chicken coops, breeding pens, chicken runs, etc, etc, etc? None. So if you are going to raise chickens at all, in that situation, you must have chickens that produce way more then they consume. You must have a chicken that can pretty much fend for itself with little or no help from you. So far, I have not found a breed of chicken in this country that has these very valuable qualities. And here is why.

When I moved out into a remote region of the Amazon Jungle in 1983 and wanted to start my own flock, can you guess what breed of chicken I went looking for? Humm... Any guesses? If you guessed "NONE"; then you guessed right. The easiest way to find good chickens that fulfill the first law of survival, is to go down to the nearest sustenance farm and buy what ever they will sale you. Because if their birds are alive, then they posses the qualities you are looking for, regardless of whether they are large, small, white, brown, red or black. The reason for this is because those chickens are products of "Natural Selection", not "Man's Selection".

In the Amazon, I had a flock of chickens that I never had to worry about or care for. Because I had the means to do so, I would throw out a pound or two of corn each day for my flock of over 100 birds, but not to feed them. I did it to teach them to come when I called, so if I needed to harvest a bird for lunch, I did not have to chase them down. My birds found their own food, raised their own young and most importantly; they are the ones who decided which rooster got to breed. My birds had to contend with the elements, disease and predators(Jaguars, Harpes Eagles, Ocelots, etc), all on their own. Well, I did kill predators when I saw them, but we are talking maybe two or three in 20 years. Not once in 20 years did I ever build a pen and put a particular rooster with a particular hen to breed them. Why? Because the qualities I wanted in my birds is a quality that can only be achieve when creation is allowed to do it's own thing, without interference from man.

I have over a 100 birds right now here in Texas. Even though the breeds I have are Gamefowl and supposed to be hardy birds that are good at free range foraging and predator evasion, I don't think they would last a week in the Amazon. Why do I think this? One reason, all the breeds I have now come from this country and are all products of Man's selection. The truth is this. There is really only two reasons Americans raise chickens; for pets or for pleasure (personal glory). While some may claim that they raise them for eggs, the truth is that they could buy the best eggs available for a lot less then what it cost to raise chickens "The American Way'. The American way of raising chickens does not follow the law of Economy of Motion. You could buy all the eggs and chicken you could eat for years to come on just the initial investment of what it cost to raise chickens the American way, with coops and runs and pens and fences and special feeds etc, etc, etc. No one in this country has to raise chickens to eat. No, we raise them for pets or for pleasure. Because of our financial well being we do not need them to produce more resources then they consume, and so we place value on qualities other then those that would make them efficient to own. So now, we target things like colors, feather length size, posture, etc. We make all the breeding selections based on what we like. Our birds are products of Man's selection and that is the way we want them.

So what is the point of all of this. Simply this. If I were in the Amazon, I would not give you ten cents for your best Game cock. The roles would be reverse there. I would call your best and purest gamefowl birds complete junk if they could not survive on their own and produce more then they consume. My birds (in the Amazon) that by your standards were "dunghills", would be the birds of the most value because they WERE products of Natural Selection, which coincedentally, is the very thing some of you "Purest" gamefowl breeders hate.

What I am trying to do here is draw a balance so that we can all learn to respect each other even if we value different things. Can you not see that, the standards that are held buy millions of chicken raisers in poor countries, make your birds valueless to them and the values that you hold make their birds valueless to you. But even though your birds may be valueless to each other, neither of you are wrong in what you are doing, as long as you respect each other.

I value qualities that come from Natural Selection and consider the process of Man's Selection to be detrimental to the qualities that I value. Do you think it would be correct for me to demean you or degrade your birds because you value qualities that come from Man's Selection and your birds are a product of that? Of course not. Then why do some of you think it is alright to demean others and degrade their birds, just because they don't subscribe to to the same breeding values that you do?

Remember that there is a big world out there with billions of people that do things differently then you do. Do not become so isolated in your thinking that you believe the whole world has to agree with you to be right when it comes to breeding chickens.

Off the soap box now. LOL!

 

[CUDA]

Well, that's all fine and dandy, but in my opinion it's inaccurate, and disrespectful to the breed when you don't breed for gameness, and still call them gamefowl. I could care less what people do with their own fowl, but don't be crossing a game chicken into an ee and call it a game. This is one of the reason there is so much junk out there that people call gamefowl, because they don't know what a game chicken is, and when you have people preaching that you can cross into a non-game breed and still call it a game is plain wrong, no matter what your opinion is. Facts are facts, if you can't understand that simple truth of that, and let that get under your skin, you need to get another hobby. Also trying to compare other breeds of chickens to gamefowl is a weak argument at best. It's also not about who's birds are better than who's, it's about breeding a strain the way is is supposed to, and I'll call out blatant misinformation every time to hopefully touch the person that is willing to understand how the birds should be bred. Anyway, that's how I see it, and I guarantee anyone who is serious about games sees it the exact same way.

 

[Jungleexplorer]

Some old pictures of my first birds in 1983.

This is the best hen I have ever had. She would hatch 12 of 12 eggs and raise them all to adulthood. I personally saw her tackle and beat the fire out of two hawks in mid air that were swooping down on her chicks.



Just some other hens I bought from a local.



I had an old picture of my first rooster, but I can't find it. He had a cushion comb and long neck. I guess he kind of look similar to a Shamo, but it was so long ago I can't remember that well. We called him Samson because he was so strong in battle. He was king of the hill until he got old his son defeated him and took his place. That is the way it is in nature.

 

[graybeard]

Coming from a rookie... Both Jungle and Cuda make very good points.

There is a particular way, these days, to keep a breed or strain pure. Going by what we KNOW to be a pure breed. Which was created by someone else in the past by selective breeding the traits that they wanted keep and pass on. This is why there are so many different breeds of the gamefowl we know today.

In the little bit that I've read on this subject, all breeds of chicken that we know of, across the world, came from one particular chicken thousands of years ago. The jungle fowl.

That means, to me, that all gamefowl and egg layers came from the same blood line. Again selective breeding the traits that one particular person wanted to pass on. If one person wanted hardy birds that could fend for themselves that's the birds they chose to reproduce. If they wanted more eggs, they only bread the birds that achieved this. Line breeding and inbreeding eventually created new color patterns that spurred off from the crossing of similar traits. These things don't just magically happen.

I do agree with Cuda, to some extent. You can't cross a pure modern day gamefowl with a non-gamefowl and immediately have a new breed. It takes time selecting the right birds from these crosses that carry the right traits of being game. To me, there certain traits that all gamefowl breeds have in common. If you keep those traits in mind while breeding, a person is very capable of creating their own breed of gamefowl or egg layers. New breeds are being accepted into the SOP all the time.

I respect everyone's input and ideas on the subject, since there is always more than one side to every story.

 

[gallo4319]

How do you know what is game and what is not game now in days .
They can dress like one:
They can walk like one :
They even crow like one
But only few have what it takes to be one
Lol

 

[fowlsessed]

Natural selection is not hated by Gamefowl breeders, just usually not possible, to a certain degree. And BTW, the good breeders cull more ruthlessly than most people ever dream of, another subject. As said, a bird that's great to someone may be useless to another breeder, but that doesn't make them junk, correct.
Yes, someone eventually came up with their own standard and went away from what everyone was doing, the point is that> they acknowledged what they had as such and such. I'm sorry, but a Leghorn that doesn't fit the standard and, lays a couple of eggs a year, and lays them brown, and perpetuates such traits, just isn't a Leghorn. We have standards for breeds, if the birds don't match, then they aren't considered as such. We don't redefine the standard to our liking, but you can go ahead and make your own.....for a new breed/type. There's a standard there in the Amazon too. If the birds didn't match it, then they were done away with, but by nature, just not yourself. Be a forger (whoever), nothing wrong with it, but know that if your "Gamefowl", let me just use Asil, look like RIRs and run and cry at the first sign of trouble, they aren't Asil, or "gamefowl", not because I say so, but because "gamefowl", or Asil, isn't left open for personal interpretation, it has a set definition. Anyways, we're all just sharing our opinions. I can honestly say, coming from a completely non-gamefowl background, that you just can't understand unless you catch the spirit of this gamefowl world, and I don't know the recipe to having that happen....even though I've been caught up in it!