Starting Him Young AT 12, HE HAS NARROWED HIS CHOICES: A VETERINARIAN OR A MARINE BIOLOGIST

By Manny Pinol

Even at a young age, my son Bernhart Immanuel, showed special kinship with and liking for animals and other living creatures.

He would be glued on TV watching Animal Planet and the National Geographic channel and he had no fear picking up and holding the squirmy earthworms and use these to scare off his older sister, Josa Bernadette, who would scream and run away as Little Imman enjoys a big laugh.

Once, he yelled and stopped me from stomping on a bee which strayed into the veranda of our farm house.

“Who’s going to pollinate the lanzones if you kill that bee?” he asked me.

Born 13 years younger than Josa and almost 17 years after the eldest daughter, Dr. Maria Krista, Imman has been showered with so much attention and affection.

But the special attention did not spoil him and his joys are very simple: to play with his cousins, Janjan and Jepoy, sons of my older brother Pat, and my workers’ sons in the farm, Clyde and Reggie.

This summer, he has chosen to stay with me in the farm tending to the Manok Pinoy flock and understanding everything I teach him about rearing and raising chicken.

Our chicken talk is not the ordinary father to child talk. It’s actually about genetics.

Once, he asked me how I selected the breeding materials for Manok PiNoy, the new strain of backyard chicken which I have bred and developed in the Braveheart Farms here in Kidapawan City, at the foot of the tall and beautiful Mt. Apo.

“We choose our breeding materials by selecting those with healthy and robust bodies because we are producing meat chicken. We eliminate and cull those with smaller and thinner bodies,” I told him.

But his response was like a Manny Pacquiao left cross: “How can you be sure Papa that the thin and small ones do not have the genes which could produce good chicks?”

I told him he could be right but that process would take a lot of time because we have to wait for the performance of the chicks and that the shortest way was to select those breeders whose physical attributes are already outstanding.

Deep inside me, however, I was impressed by the deep understanding of a 12-year-old kid of animal genetics.

This early, Imman has already narrowed down his choices to being a marine biologist or an animal doctor.

“My sisters are doctors of human beings while I will be a doctor of animals,” he said.

He is getting more inclined to be a veterinarian especially when I explain to him that somebody will have to take over my work with the Manok PiNoy chicken in the farm.

As Imman gets closer to the animals in and shows great joy in spending a lot of his time in the farm, I now feel more comfortable that somebody will carry on the work which I have started – to develop a new breed of backyard chicken which could later help improve the lives of ordinary Filipiino farming families in the countryside.

(Photos caption: Imman feeds a flock of Plymouth Barred Rock (left) and shows off the huge Dalag he and his friends Reggie and Clyde caught in the fishpond.)