174 



THE BOOK OF POULTRY. 



Mr. Tegetmeier's 

 Attack. 



more detailed accusations made by Mr. W. B. 

 Tegetmeier, in Poultry for the Table and Market 

 versus Fancy Fozvls* The author of this work 

 was, as he states, a poultry judge at exhibitions 

 for over a third of a century, and 

 it is remarkable that his state- 

 ments should be the most extreme 

 of all. He writes : " I do not 

 hesitate to affirm, as the result of my experience 

 of half a century, that no one breed of fowls has 

 been taken in hand by the fancier that has not 

 been seriously depreciated as a useful variety of 

 poultry " ; and again, " Our agricultural societies 

 are doing what I conceive to be considerable 

 injury by giving prizes for useless birds," gi^'ing 

 as the reason that " fancy points only have to 

 be considered by the judges." He then pro- 

 ceeds to prove these statements, as he considers, 

 by comparing the fowls of forty years ago with 

 the same varieties as seen to-day. These 

 details it is which are chiefly valuable, as 

 showing the measure of truth and that of error, 

 in regard to both his facts and his conclusions. 



Two important but common mistakes funda- 

 mental to all this should first be mentioned. 

 They were both brought into relief at the 

 National Poultry Conference held at Reading 

 in July, 1 899, in an able paper by the late Mr. 

 O. E. Cresswell, upon " Exhibition Poultry and 

 Its Influence on the Poultry Industry of the 

 Country," and the discussion which followed. 

 The first of them is to suppose that the 

 " exhibited " races of fowls have any distinction 

 from other and non-exhibited races ; they are 

 simply the best of the same, from a certain 

 exhibition point of view. The second error, 

 and more important by far, touches the state- 

 ment that the cause of all the evils alleged lies 

 in judging by "fancy faints only." As \lx. 

 Cresswell clearly brought out, these points, 

 now called " fancy only," were most of them 

 originally adopted because char- 

 Fancy Points acterising the best specimens of 

 originally the races, and believed to refre- 



Utility Points. ^q^i some Jisefnl quality, or to 

 be connected with it. 

 This may be illustrated from Mr. Teget- 

 meier's own pages, in one of the most extreme 

 cases, wherein we have frankly to admit that a 

 breed once useful as a layer, and even as a 

 chicken, really has been utterly spoilt as a useful 

 fowl — that of the Cochin. The first show we 

 took any personal interest in was during the 

 Crimean War — hence probably in 1855 — and 

 our first buff Cochin chickens were hatched the 

 following year. Mr. Tegetmeier's drawing quite 



• Horace Cox, Field Office. This work was first published 

 in 1892. We dte from the third edition, published in 1898. 



fairly represents these, much closer feathered 

 and less massive-looking than those of the 

 present day, with, of course, far less shank- 

 feather ; and we can remember distinctly that 

 the flesh was quite, and the skin very nearly. 

 white. We also remember the birds as good 

 layers. As Mr. Tegetmeier quite truly says, 



"Cochins, as at present exhibited, 

 Illustrated ^'^^ a- mass of useless feathers."+ 

 in Cochins. There could be no stronger case , 



and yet it can be shown that if the 

 fancier has erred, he did so from good motives 

 in the first place. In Mr. Tegetmeier's own 

 Poultry Book of 1S66, the late Mr. Hewitt writes 

 upon the earliest Cochins as follows : — 



The reason why some Cochins lay so much better 

 than others is that those which most abound with 

 " fluff," as it is termed, or downy covering towards 

 the roots of the feathers, are comparatively less in- 

 fluenced by sudden changes in the atmosphere, and 

 consequently their laying is unimpeded. I have noted, 

 as a rule without exception, that diminution of plumage 

 and a scanty, " weedy " build is always accompanied, 

 with proportionate decrease in the number of eggs 

 produced. I am confirmed in this opinion from the 

 fact that the best layers of Cochin fowls I ever yet met 

 with were white, a colour generally reputed by those 

 who keep any kind of live stock as being the most 

 weakly in constitution. They were the fowls with 

 which I obtained first prize at the Birmingham E.\hibi- 

 tion of 1853. They were most extraordinary fowls as 

 to the superabundance of " fluff." 



We know now that this was wrong ; that 

 Mr. Hewitt generalised too hastily from insuf- 

 ficient facts ; and that tight plumage really goes 

 with free layers, loose and flossy feather with 

 poor laying and coarse skin. But fanciers did 

 not know it then ; they sought the mass of 

 fluffy feather as a point really good and useful, 

 and Mr. Tegetmeier himself, in a work the most 

 influential of all others for years prior to 1872, 

 helped to spread the error. His responsibility 

 goes, indeed, much farther than this. He was not 

 only acting as a judge for many years, but so 

 acting at a period when, as shown in Chap. XIV., 

 individual judges had far more power in deciding 

 type than any of them possess now. He was, in 

 addition, actually the editor and superintendentof 

 the first Standard of Excellence, which, as further 

 indicated in the chapter just referred to, was the 

 precursor and foundation of its successors. As 

 these earlier errors were discovered, considerable 

 responsibility therefore rested upon him to 

 direct judging into more correct lines. We have 

 repeatedly endeavoured to do so from the fiist, 



+ He adds a very interesting explanation, which would 

 never have occurred to us, that as feathers consist of nearly dry 

 nitrogenous matter, while flesh consists of such matter combined 

 v/ith, say, three parts water (see Analyses, p. .t,^, it costs aj 

 much in food to produce I lb. of feathers as 4 lbs. of meat, and 

 all wasted in moult annually. 



