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I keep reading that here & have never heard it anywhere else. I know breeders of some of the best Wyandottes in the country, large fowl & bantah, & this is not their practice. That said I have also never seen a single combed "Wyandotte" when visiting their farms.
There is a giant difference between show breeders and commercial hatcheries.
If you were a show breeder, yeah, you would not want to be producing bunches of chicken that were massively useless (single combed), and you would ideally be well enough in control of your gene pool that you were not having ongoing fertility/hatchability problems ANYhow.
If you are a commercial hatchery, however, you do not care if you produce some percentage of single combs, as you sell them right along with the other chicks for the same price; and a high premium is placed on the highest fertility/hatchability possible, without people being likely to want to fuss around with it by selection and multiple lines and so forth.
So I do not think the two situations are particularly comparable.
Pat
Hmmm....most of our show quality chickens don't lay well and are up and down on fertility and do not hatch well. I like to think we know what we are doing. If they laid and hatched like leghorns they would be available to everyone that was looking......instead, people really have to search hard to find breeders willing to let go of a pair or two because they are so hard to raise. I don't think anyone on BYC could find a breeder willing to let go of a pair of SQ SLWs even though they are getting popular on this board.
single combs can also come out of pure rose comb flocks.
