136 LL550N5 IN POULTRY KEEPING SECOND SERIES. 



Every novice in the show room, and I think I may say every veteran as well, is possessed of 

 the ambition to put into an exhibition a string of birds of his own breeding that will win prizes 

 enough to give him high honor as a breeder. To the novice it looks like a matter of buying 

 good stock to start with and carefully selecting and reserving his choicest specimens. The 

 veteran sees the matter differently. He knows that while it might be an easy matter to do that 

 if lie had the field to himself, with so many others striving to do the same thing there will 

 almost invariably be a general division of prizes in any competition which is a competition in 

 fact as well as in name. It is only at rare intervals that a breeder of a variety in which there 

 is strong competition produces in his own yards as many first class specimens as he needs to 

 nter in a strong class with reasonable expectation of getting his share of the prizes given. The 

 really first class specimens are as a rule produced a few here and a few there many of them 

 by persons who either do not care to exhibit or would rather part with them at a good figure 

 than take the trouble, risk, and uncertainty of winning in exhibition. Hence there are every 

 year for sale a good many birds such as the breeders who wish to make large displays need to 

 supplement their own production. 



The rules of shows generally require that the bird exhibited shall be the bona fide property 

 of the owner. That means that it must be his absolutely without any understanding or reserva- 

 tion. Occasionally at some show or in some special competition it is required that only birds 

 tired by the exhibitor be entered by him, but as a rule the shows make no requirement of this 

 aiature going back of present ownership. The buying and selling of exhibition fowls cannot by 

 any reasonable interpretation or application of common principles of right and wrong be made 

 a wrong or even an objectionable practice. On the contrary, in its legitimate phases it may be 

 aid to be the most important feature of the interest in standard bred poultry. 



But about this entirely legitimate feature of the business have grown up several abuses, most 

 conspicuous of which is the lending and borrowing of specimens for exhibition. 



This is carried on in two ways : By simple borrowing and lending with not even a nominal 

 hange in the actual ownership of the bird ; and by fictitious sale, or sale on such terms that it 

 is substantially fictitious. 



The practice began with simple borrowing and lending, but as poultry exhibitors generally 

 irowned on it and general opinion would not condone it as it does some of the more prevalent 

 iorms of faking, those who wished to avail themselves of the use of exhibition specimens 

 which they could not buy outright, and those who for various reasons were willing that their 

 *>irds should be exhibited by others, devised the plan of selling birds conditionally, the bird to 

 t>e returned after the show, and the price paid for it to be refunded. Such an arrangement is 

 of course a mere juggle with right and wrong. The fiction of a sale does no more than make it 

 impossible to prove the facts in the case until after the awards are made and the premiums 

 paid. It does not often happen that birds "lent" in this way get back to their owner without 

 interested competitors of the exhibitor finding it out sooner or later. Actual and positive proof 

 of wrong doing and identification of birds is however so difficult that so far no effective check 

 Sias been put on the practice. I do not think anyone has ever attempted to justify it. The 

 sid vantages to be gained by it, both for those who borrow and those who lend, are so great that 

 the temptation to make arrangements of this kind are very strong, and though the proportion 

 of specimens in any show not actually the property of the exhibitor in whose name they are 

 entered is probably always very small, I suppose that there are few exhibitors who have not at 

 some time, perhaps in a very small way, yielded to the temptation to lend or to borrow. Many 

 \vlio would not exhibit birds not their own, have occasionally lent birds. Many who think the 

 practice wrong have in emergencies borrowed birds. With the great majority such lapses have 

 l>een exceptional, not habitual. 



The disposition to lend to do a fellow fancier a favor is a manifestation of an excellent 

 trait in human nature. With many fanciers the need of not indulging it does not become 

 sipparent until, having indulged it, they find that they must share in the common condemnation 

 of the borrower. 



The opportunity to borrow, say, at the time when a loss of or injury to a specimen upon 

 which an exhibitor was relying has greatly diminished his prospects of making a good win- 

 ning, presents itself as an evil of very small importance compared with the loss from which 



