Gamefowl Outcrossing: Developing New Breeds or Introducing New Blood
Outcrossing is a breeding method where breeders use a bird from a different bloodline or breed and pair them with another breed or bloodline. This effectively introduces new blood to a line and increases genetic diversity, allowing for new traits to be passed down and to make a bloodline healthy once more. While seemingly simple, this is instead more strategic as breeders will need to be selective with where they’ll get a bird to pair with their own.
What is Outcrossing?
Gamefowl outcrossing is pairing unrelated birds with each other to try and produce a superior bird by passing the best traits of both birds into the offspring. Some breeders pair the same strain of gamefowl or chicken breed to create a pure strain without the risks of inbreeding as the two birds are still unrelated.
Paring the same strain doesn’t result in passing desirable traits, but it is still useful to maintain certain gamefowl breeds and bloodlines when they’re already endangered. This is vital to increase the number of Malays and allow breeders to develop new fighting roosters based on this breed and leverage their natural cockfighting traits.
Benefits of Gamefowl Outcrossing
The main advantage of outcrossing gamefowls is being able to pass down the good traits of two different birds to a new offspring, allowing breeders to introduce new blood necessary to revitalize a bloodline or to create a new superior breed. The Kelsos and the Hatches are some of the most notable breeds today that were made using outcrossing different birds and the Asils and Malays are some of the best breeds to use to improve and revitalize bloodlines.
Outcrossing birds intelligently will produce the following results:
Keep in mind the word “intelligently” since randomly crossing different birds can result in instead passing down undesirable traits. Breeders must first ensure that they successfully linebreed their own gamefowl line and get a bird with good pedigree to ensure the quality of the resulting offspring.
The Blueface Hatch is a variation of the Hatch breed that was bred by heavily outcrossing a throwaway McLean Hatch brood cock with an old hen that was known for producing winning roosters and then crossing the offspring to a different hen and Leiper Hatches to eventually produce the Blueface.
Risks of Gamefowl Outcrossing
Outcrossing still has some risks associated with it, but not to the same extent as that of linebreeding and inbreeding. The main problem with outcrossing is the potential risk of producing a bird with undesirable traits from both birds when done randomly and without the necessary knowledge and expertise to ensure that the pedigree of the birds involved are good.
Many experienced breeders will try to create new breeds or revitalize their existing breeds or bloodlines by pairing two well known gamefowl breeds to try and create a better one. The results of doing this are not guaranteed to produce a good fighting rooster as some failures can also be produced from time to time. One notable example is the creation of the Cornish Game that is anything but a gamefowl and is useful as a broiler bird even when the Asil and another fighting rooster breed were paired together.
While the Cornish is well-known today, it’s more than likely that more failures are left unnamed as they were culled or simply left as is as they had no notable use unlike the Cornish.
Conclusion
Outcrossing gamefowls is necessary to produce new birds from pairing two different fighting rooster breeds. This usually results in the creation of new gamefowl breeds but also results in occasional failures like the Cornish Game.
Read more about the different breeding techniques at Sabong International as well as the top gamefowl breeds to use for outcrossing to produce new birds. Keep in mind that Asils and Malays are some of the best birds for this.
