302 OUR DOMESTIC BIRDS 



stock of any variety is of uniform quality. When they learn that, 

 as a rule, only a small part of the young birds hatched from good 

 stock is considered of superior quality, they often conclude that 

 the ideas and the standards of fanciers must be wrong. Even 

 professional and scientific men who become interested in fancy 

 poultry and pigeons often take this view and, after considering 

 the question carefully from their standpoint, try to explain to fan- 

 ciers how, by changing a standard, they might secure a much 

 larger proportion of specimens approximately perfect according 

 to the standard used. In the case of varieties in which the finest 

 specimens of the different sexes are secured from different mat- 

 ings, many novices waste a great deal of time trying to con- 

 vince old fanciers that their standards and methods are illogical 

 and unnatural. 



To those who do not understand the philosophy of the interest 

 in breeding to highly specialized types the arguments for stand- 

 ards that are adjusted to common results and are easy to attain 

 appear to be unanswerable. Upon the fancier who does under- 

 stand this philosophy they make no impression at all. The 

 breeding and exhibiting of fancy stock of any kind is primarily 

 a game. The rules of the game are in a measure arbitrary, like 

 the rules in baseball or football or any other game. At the same 

 time they must be framed in the interests of the development of 

 the game as a sport and also as a spectacle. They must be rea- 

 sonable and must be suited to players of all degrees of skill. 



Standards and rules for judging fancy stock develop just as 

 the rules of athletic games develop. A generation ago such 

 games as baseball and football were comparatively simple games 

 in which boys and men might take very creditable parts without 

 devoting a great deal of attention to practice. These games still 

 afford recreation to many who use them for that purpose only, 

 but they have also been developed so that players of exceptional 

 skill play competition games for the interest of a public which 

 studies the fine points of these games and compares the abilities 



