How to select brood fowl from outside sources
The real key to success in game fowl breeding is selection. The ability to select our brood fowl will make or unmake us as a breeder. Selecting a brood cock is much like selecting a good battle cock. Selecting a hen is more complicated and less accurate. Nonetheless, most of the factors that apply to selecting a brood cock apply to selecting a hen. The only difference is that we cannot select a hen based on its fighting ability.
Select a brood cock like you select a battle fowl with the additional concern that the individual to be utilized as brood cock has better chances of being prepotent. A seed fowl for certain desirable traits. So say, we have a potential brood cock in hand. Nice looks, great fighting ability. How then would we judge the cock’s potential to be a prepotent brood cock? Well, if the particular cock is a product of our own breeding, then, we know if the traits it manifested are ingrained in its phenotype. For example if it manifested speed in sparring, and we have been breeding this particular line for speed over an ample period, then you will know that the speed on the cock was bred into it and not just acquired through some lucky draw of genes.
If we didn’t breed the cock ourselves, then, there would be some problem. We can ask the breeder how this particular cock was bred, but we cannot rely that his answers are all accurate. Some breeders are downright dishonest. But even the honest ones may not divulge everything. He might consider a few facts as trade secrets. Or maybe he’ll tell us some white lies just to satisfy what we want to hear. The best we can do is to ask the breeder if we can see the full brothers of this cock spar. If its full brothers fight similar to the potential brood cock then chances are good that the characteristics they all possess are deeply rooted in their bloodline and thus can be passed on to succeeding generations.
Why not ask to see the father instead? It is not possible to check if the breeder had shown you the true father, but in the case of the full brothers we may check the nose and web marks. Also the fighting style of the father may differ from the offspring because of the possibility that the influence on the offspring came from the mother. However, it is better if we are shown the father too; and, the mother and sisters for that matter. Seeing the entire range of individuals in the family will give us much better idea of the family’s value.
This is also the way in selecting hens, except that we cannot see the fighting style of the hens. So we just settle for taking a look at its full brothers. The most important factor, however, in selecting brood fowl is the family’s actual pit performance. If selecting from among your own yards it is not a problem of course, since we would have records, if we keep records, but when acquiring from a source then, by any means, we have to determine pit performance. We can do this by asking around, or observing, yourself, the actual pit performance of the line. It may take time but you better bear with it than suffer the consequences later of not doing so.
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