THE ART OF CREATING CHALLENGE AND EXCITEMENT OF PRACTICAL FARM GENETICS By Manny Pinol

Very few people know that the fried chicken served in most fastfood outlets are actually descendants of a breed of fighting chicken which came from East Asia and brought to England where they were called the Cornish Game.

How this hardy breed of chicken which belonged to the Aseel line was turned into a distinct breed which grows to 1.5 kilos in just 30 days with tender meat could be attributed to years and years of genetic experimentation and improvement.

This is the beauty of the science of genetics. It is the magic of creating something better by simply mixing the qualities of the parent stocks.

I am an avid student of animal genetics. I have been involved with goat and gamefowl breeding before I ventured into the breeding of a new strain of backyard chicken adaptable to Philippine conditions.

Manok Pinoy, the name I gave to this new strain of backyard meat chicken which grows to market size in three months, is now in demand among native chicken breeders.

It was in gamefowl breeding though where I really encountered tough and difficult challenges.

Unlike in the breeding of meat chicken where the breeder will only have to be concerned with growth rate, feed to weight conversion ratio and the texture and taste of the meat, gamefowl breeding involves a lot of unseen and invisible qualities.

The breeder does not discover qualities like gameness, accurate cutting and intelligence unless the gamefowl is brought to the pit where he is tested. This happens usually three years after the gamefowl is bred.

If the breeder finds out that the gamefowl that he bred and nurtured for three years did not meet the standards he set to make it an outstanding fighting rooster, he goes back to square one and starts all over again.

This is the reason why breeders like me spend many years experimenting on what outstanding genetic combination could give them the “W” during the actual competition.

In my farm in Kidapawan City, I keep only three major lines of gamefowls and one of these is a breed called the Bates Grey which were bred by an American master breeder, Richard Bates who moved to the Philippines as a young man and stayed here until the day he died.

I acquired the Bates Greys from an American breeder Larry Carter after driving all the way from Los Angeles to Davis, Oklahoma in 2000.

I have kept these Greys for 14 years now and while I cannot possibly claim that they are perfect fighting roosters, I admire their gameness, their flight and most of all their color.

Over the years, I have experimented on this breed and produced Greys in different hues.

I have created Black Greys, White Greys, Regular Greys and the lovely Golden Greys.

But whatever color they have, they all perform in a style which is common to all of them – they break high, cut well and are game to the end.

I know there are some people who frown on cockfighting but I hold no grudge over that.

Cockfighting in the Philippines is a cultural thing just as the matadors fight the bulls in a one-sided bout and just like the British who shoot pheasants and foxes during the hunting season but never even eat them.

For me, the ultimate joy as a breeder is not in the fighting of the roosters but in creating something beautiful by just using your imagination.

But going back to practical farm genetics, I believe farmers should really be taught on how understand genetics.

For example, how would a farmer make sure that he would produce consistently sweet pomelo or lanzones or prolific fruit-bearing cocnuts?

He can actually do this by identifying the fruit trees with the sweetest fruits or the coconu tree with the most number of nuts per bunch.

When identified, these trees could be the source of his scions or seed nuts.

How does he improve his backyard chicken?

He can do this by simply culling the poor egg producers and those with thin bodies.

When the farmer learns this, farming becomes an exciting thing and every day that comes along is a new moment of discovery.

(Photos show the Manok Pinoy cockerels and pullets and the Grey stags I produced this breeding season.)