Signs of "Line Breeding"?

[cgmccary]

DiVon80: . . . I had poultry most of my life. You know how I know a persons experience with breeding is: Beginners only see the faults..They don't have the experience to see good type. There are no perfect animals. Just good representatives. Every animal you put on the planet will have some fault. Its up to you to limit them...A new breed: you have 4 with funky feet 2 with good. Put down the deformed birds nurture the correct ones. Log all this info. down. If you keep, keeping deformed birds as food egg layers when you finally have acess to quality you wont have the space or money to purchase. If you want to be a breeder you have to love the breed more then the individual. And you will have to cull. Thats why buying eggs is like buying a fetus. You only have the parents to look at. And that is if you are lucky. A pedigree is a description of particular individuals. As a rule you will know more about your babies from their grandparents.

First, let me say that I am not a Marans breeder, I don't have Marans and do not have a dog in this hunt. I agree with you there are no perfect specimens. Your advice is good advice except I differ with your definition of persons experienced in breeding as follows: I would add that it is important not just to keep birds that are the best representative of the breeds but to also, it is most important to keep diversity in your line.


"A point on proper terms which may be useful for some readers of this thread. Many people use bloodline and strain interchangeably. Bloodline is a term which describes a population of birds, somewhat related, under the care of one breeder. Strain is a term which describes a population of birds, somewhat related, under the care of several breeders in several locations. In other words, your flock is your bloodline; when I buy birds from you and raise them without introducing other stock I am now working with your strain. After three years I could legitimately claim my birds as my bloodline of your strain. "​

 

[kathyinmo]

Quote:
This all makes sense to me, and with the examples posted it sorta proves it. If more than one in a hatch has this, it sounds likely to be a vitamin deficiency in the breeders. And besides that, I know that you know what you are talkin' about.

 

[Ryu]

We do not have BC Marans anymore, but we did recieve hatching eggs and hatched out quite a few fused toes. I used a scalpel and separated the toes wrapped the toes with gauze and taped them to a thin piece of cardboard to straighten them. I took the gauze off a couple days later and the chicks grew up just fine.

I did do a breeding with these chickens and we had no crooked or fused toes.

The problem appeared to be a diet issue with the original breeder birds. Perhaps Marans are more sensitive to these vitamin defficiencies than other breeds, but I didn't see an inheritance of these issues with the birds we hatched.

 

[Steve_of_sandspoultry]

Quote:
I agree it's a diet issue, Marans do tend to be heavy feeders. (more so than other breeds we raise of the same size) I have noticed with our Marans that they need extra calcium or the shells get thin.

Steve

 

[kathyinmo]

Quote:
I disagree that new blood is needed in any line. Old poultry fanciers often had closed flocks, never adding new blood, and some of those lines still exist today.

 

[Jared77]

Old poultry fanciers often had closed flocks, never adding new blood, and some of those lines still exist today.

And those are some of the best lines out there for their breed too right Kathy?

Linebreeding is not bad. There is really no need for outcrosses if you want consistancy. Linebreeding is perfectly acceptable and it produces results. It happens in nature ALL THE TIME. This is how many species are created and others survive. Look at the Galapagos islands for example. Its a totally isolated area where the few animals that made it to that island can only interbreed. There isn't any other opportunity to introduce "new blood" yet these animals have survived for thousands of years. In fact through natural selection AKA CULLING that these species are created and thrive. The ones that are best suited for the enviroment, the strongest, the healthiest make it to pass on their genes as breeders. They are dealing with a limited gene pool, and yet they are still fertile through thousands of years.

Lets take some animals that are on an isolated island. There is a male and female and they have babies. Some of these babies are lost because they are not as competitive for a variety of reasons but the strongest survive.

To keep things simple lets say the father and mother are unrelated. Some of the daughters grow up and are now of breeding age. Some didn't survive because their genetics did not make them as competitive. Now he breeds his daughters because he's the dominant male and they have babies. They will have 3/4 of the original males traits good and bad. Those with the good traits will make it, and those without will not. The enviroment/God/Mother Nature whatever you want to call it make the decision on what traits are passed on and which ones are not. They are culled from the breeding population by death. Simple harsh fact.

When you work with a closed flock its no different. You have to make the decisions on what you want to breed and what you think should be culled. You direct those breedings, and you decide what goes on in your closed enviorment your little isolated island to pass on their traits. It can go on for years successfully just like on the Galapagos islands without an issue. You have to cull hard but what makes the cut will be that much better. So many folks on here ooh and ahh over the quality of some of the birds that some folks have on here. They didnt get it by making random outcrosses. No they linebred, culled hard and set high standards for their breeding program. The end result is something really good and its consistant. It works for egg color, size, feather color, combs, legs whatever you want to improve on. You breed on the best you have, cull and breed up from there. The folks that have closed flocks are at an advantage because their lines are not radically different. They can keep them close so they don't loose all the good things they already have in their flock, yet can still improve areas that they lack through breeding.

Its a system that works, I've done it and I've had some spectacular results. Do your homework, read up on these things and try applying them. In a few generations you'll see what we're talking about.

Best of luck to you out there...!​

 

[snowbird]

This is a Genetic faults that has been studied as far back as 1909 and is called Syndactyly, ther is an article on this in the book Poultry Breeding by Morley A. Jull on page #213. Don

 

[allen wranch]

Thank you to the experienced breeders on our forum. This is a good discussion and how people learn.

 

[kathyinmo]

Quote:
More recent studies show:

Nutrient Requirements of Poultry By National Research Council (U.S.). Committee on Animal Nutrition

Feeding mature fowl biotin deficient ration causes reduced egg hatchability, but egg production is not adversely affected. This indicates that the requirement of biotin for producing hatching eggs is higher than that for maintaining good health and egg production. Evidence of biotin deficiency in embryos includes parrot beak, chondrodystrophy, micromelia, and syndactyly. Dermatitis observed like that found in chicks fed biotin deficient rations has not appeared in hens.

In breeding chickens, folacin deficiency reduces egg production and hatchability. Deficient embryos show bending of the tibiotarsus, mandible defects, syndactyly, and hemorrhages.

Effects of Vitamin B2 deficiency......
Curled toes, poor growth, weak and emaciation are seen in young birds. Leg muscles are atrophied and flabby. The skin is dry and harsh. Poor hatchability and egg production can occur in adults. Dead embryos have "clubbed" down feathers. Poults have severe dermatitis of the feet and shanks and incrustations on the corners of the mouth.

 

[BlacksheepCardigans]

OK, I'm NOT ignorant on linebreeding, and in fact have taught college-level classes in population ecology and genetics.

Keeping a closed flock, creating higher and higher coefficents of inbreeding (the expression of how closely related an individual is to another individual), DOES create consistency. In fact, carried to its ultimate you end up with a population where each of the individuals is close to a clone of all the others.

What happens to that population, inevitably, is three things:

1) You lose fertility and fecundity (both the ability of the male and female to produce offspring and the numbers of those offspring who are born). That's very obvious in chicken strains, where low hatchability and low egg production and, in many strains, low vigor of newly hatched chicks plague many of the show-bred birds.

You WILL lose fecundity and fertility - it's inevitable, because that's how inbreeding depression works - unless you specifically select for it as your top criteria when you're inbreeding (and linebreeding is just a flavor of inbreeding). Since those are not measured in the show hall, very few breeders do so. The breeders who DO select for it are the hatcheries, who develop tightly inbred strains that are then hybridized specifically for egg production. So you can see what happens when you select for fecundity - nondescript birds who lay like machines - and it's not a choice show breeders are going to make.

2) You leave the entire flock with only one choice in their genetic makeup. They MUST have feathering of a certain type and color, MUST have combs of a certain point and size, etc. That's the "consistency" everyone works toward. However, that consistency is ALSO being repeated inside the bird. They only have one choice as to how to respond to disease, one choice as to how to respond to vitamin deficiencies, one choice how to respond to parasites, etc. Inbred populations are very prone to "plague events," because whereas in a very loosely related group all their immune systems work a little differently and while a couple of them might be lost the others will make it through, a tightly related group will all succumb.

3) You are much more likely to see the weird stuff that might pop up only extremely seldom in loosely related groups. You're forcing the population to combine and re-combine the same set of genetic information over and over, so recessive genes and mutations will meet up and be expressed much more regularly than in the larger unrelated group (chickens at large). In a tightly inbred group you get more of the good stuff - the extremes in conformation and type - but you're also going to get more of the bad stuff.

All these have been observed in wild inbred populations too - the inbred Galapagos strains exist on the constant edge of extinction because they have none of the defenses that their original-type cousins do. It's not like the Galapagos animals are hanging out having a great time, reproducing like crazy and being healthy and happy. They need to be actively kept alive by the strenuous intervention of humans, because they're not doing it on their own.

Tight linebreeding is a very effective tool to produce consistency. But it has an extremely steep price that many breeders - and probably even fewer normal owners - are not willing to pay. Those who refuse to do it have less consistency in type but a generally more vigorous group of birds. (Remember that the comparison must be between GROUPS - everybody will have individual birds who do better or worse, but when seen across their hundreds or thousands the statistics become more clear.) It all depends on what your priorities are as a breeder, and while I have strong opinions I don't have any right to beat anybody over the head with them. If you want to inbreed like crazy that's your privilege. But it is NOT the only right way to breed and it is not something that should be recommended unless you really communicate the bad stuff that comes along with it.

One final note - in every wild population the first priority of each living thing is to get away from its relatives. The drive to scatter and breed with an unrelated individual is so strong that it will overcome even the pressures of food or safety. From bacteria to primates, everybody's trying to NOT breed with mom or dad or brother or sister. We humans, who think we know better when it comes to domesticated animals, might do well to give that some thought.