THE BREEDER— HIS PLACE AND HIS WORK 43 



class specimens. By accepting the visible qualities of fowls at their 

 true worth, you establish a base on which the imagination may safely 

 play in picturing the possibilities of birds when mating up the breed- 

 ing pens. Breeding is not merely a matter of pedigree; simply 

 breeding back to a good sire or dam is not in itself sufficient to 

 guarantee success, and an eye for a bird is the greatest asset that 

 any breeder can have. 



The work of the breeder. The poultry breeder sees a great deal 

 of breeding. He not only is working with a species that matures 

 quickly and has an annual cycle, but the number of eggs that a 

 single hen may lay in the breeding season, or the number of young 

 that one sire may get, is great enough to afford a wide range for 

 observation and critical selection when the ^young are grown. 



A Shorthorn cattleman may buy a bred cow and raise a bull calf; 

 buy two heifers "on speculation"; go to a sale and buy a cow with 

 a calf at her side, and be termed one of the purebred breeders of his 

 county. In reality, such man has purchased only a little blood, and 

 has a feed lot back of him. The poultry breeder must be infinitely 

 more than this. He must be a detail man. He must know every 

 part of the material with which he works, and, in addition to knowing 

 good quality when he sees it, he must know the fundamentals of 

 breeding good quality. 



Building a strain. There are beginners who take up poultry and 

 secure stock from one breeder, then from another source the follow- 

 ing j'ear, keeping within the breed, to be sure; yet these buyers do 

 not have a clear perception of what they are seeking, because they 

 do not have a clear perception of what they are trying to produce. 

 New blood should be introduced for a definite purpose, to improve 

 some point, to check some fault. There can be no such definiteness 

 of purpose unless the breeder has a standard of quality well defined 

 in his mind and is ever working toward that ideal. 



If the experienced breeder were to go out of business and then 

 begin over again to reestablish himself, he would go to a flock of 

 his chosen breed, and, with the Standard type firmly set in his mind, 

 he would select from the available specimens, with some respect to 

 blood lines and pedigree, those that measured up to what he required. 

 None would be perfect but all would be strong, healthy birds, with 

 a good point to balance and counteract every poor point possessed by 

 any other, so that, as far as possible, birds having the same defects 

 would not have to be mated together. This selection would give the 

 breeder, in his chosen birds and carefully mated pens, a selective type 

 that would distinctly set his line of stock ahead of the common pre- 

 vailing type. By interbreeding this stock, the breeder soon would 

 have a strain within the breed — his own strain. 



The value of selection. Selection is the secret of the breeder's 

 magic. It enabled Sir John Sebright to produce a breed of Bantams 

 which bears his name and of which breed the birds were so uniform 



