I'm not sure. Animal husbandry is an incredibly complicated topic and every chicken breed has wildly differing amounts of genetic bottlenecking
The general outline that more inbreeding = higher Marek's mortality is easy to identify, but the specifics of each breed and how to line-breed them is...
80% of the chicken population is estimated to carry Marek's, with the majority being asymptomatic carriers
The main breeds that are well known for being suspectable to Marek's are those with high levels of inbreeding (Silkie, Sebright, Orpington, etc.) Humans of course breed for visibly obvious...
I highly doubt that any government stooge could recognize these in the first place. I would just call them mixed gamefowl or something
Egyptian Fayoumi also have a heavy amount of Ceylon junglefowl blood for the record. They even retained the unique polyandry breeding habits of the Ceylon
My...
Mindless berserkers that fight to the death against everything would be removed from the gene pool very fast. IIRC Florida Bullfrog made a good point that even gamefowl probably don't fight to the death under natural circumstances, but that death-fighting is likely the result of social...
It seems counterintuitive to me to use immunodeficient chickens as founding stock for a survival breed. If they really need to be specially quarantined and protected from contact with outsiders, are they really fit for such a project? Perhaps I'm missing something here
I have some half Indio Gigante running around right now and the majority of them seem to be nearly identical in size to their pure AGF half-siblings. Only 2 of perhaps 10 are significantly larger
I suspect that size comes down to a variety of different genes and the AGF size genes are dominant
Back when I had goats they absolutely loved the stuff and they would excitedly run to it whenever the opportunity arose. It must genuinely taste good to ruminants
My chickens ignore it though. Again, I'd wager because they have a hen teaching them from hatch
I just googled "dog fennel" for the first time. I have this stuff everywhere but I've never seen a chicken of mine eat it before. Maybe this is because all of my chickens are born outdoors to broody hens. My chickens love eating bamboo and even yaupon sometimes, but never this dog fennel
I don't have any decent pictures yet and he's brand new here so perhaps in a year after I have some documented results I can make a thread on it
I don't want to distract from OP's project, so I'll just share this one bad picture. It's my IG rooster with my favorite AGF hen, with both just under...
I sold all of my goats recently because after doing the math I figured out they increased consumption here rather than production
Production is the heart of farming. To be able to produce excess calories from nature
My chickens on the other hand are gold and they're at their most efficient the...
When I read the comment about smells my mind instantly went to my poop eating dog. I know his sense of smell is 10,000 times better than mine
Maybe my sense of smell just isn't good enough to appreciate it
This is exactly what my RJF and all of my other breeds do. I have protected state forest directly touching my land but they don't go more than 50 feet into it
My semi-feral flock is actually slowly spreading towards other human establishments instead of the true wilderness in the opposite...
Thank you for the knowledge and insight. It's nice to see a clear summary of where a project both aims and currently stands. I hope your project is successful because the idealized chicken you speak of would be the apex chicken breed for free-ranging mutualism
That's basically what I'm asking. Whenever I see truly feral chickens that have existed in relative isolation for decades or centuries, they're always very small and lightning fast bantams
Will a large bird be able to replicate this success?
I suppose this is also asking, is the survival in...
Based on the results of your project and experience so far, do you believe that your large survival gamefowl will be able to meet or exceed the evolutionary success of the American Game Bantam?