CONCENTRATED BREEDING
by Jim Emerton
With breeding your own family of related pigeons, some line breeding to a common ancestor may be the case, and inbreeding to relatives. In my strain common ancestors figure many times in the pedigree. The objective is to concentrate performance potential, determined to a degree by the genes in the offspring. Now pigeon genetics in respect of performance is not an exact science as much as theorists write about inbreeding and line breeding and outbreeding. The birds you pair will all be of mixed origins from way back, and beyond particular pigeons that are familiar to you. A clever racing system will discover the performance curve of each bird in race reality. I concentrate on the hard evidence of actual race performance, which may be indicative of some ancient ancestor, rather than say the parents, and the apples often fall a long way from the tree. There are some birds at stock which have all my performance birds in their breeding, yet the irony is that they may or may not produce good offspring pure or outbred. No matter what mindset you take with any birds very few will cut the mustard in marathon racing. I was very fortunate to get 3 from 6 at 879 miles from which g.children are still breeding. The whole area is a continuous practical experiment to prove both your ideas and birds and is the area where some expertise may result from your toil.
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Elimar - November 2014
