Farming Sunday BREEDING THE ICONIC ASEEL

By Manny Pinol

Among the different breeds of chicken in the world, there is one which stands out as perhaps the oldest known line of the domesticated bird.

It is called the “Aseel,” a Middle Eastern word meaning “pure” or “original.”

The Aseels are remarkable for their sizes, some strains of which grow to as huge as 8 kilos, and their fast growth with the males breaching the 3-kilo mark in just 8 to 10 months.

The meat of this breed is firm and has become the favorite fare of Filipinos who prefer “native” chicken for barbecue, lechon and tinola.

But propagating the “Aseel” faces very serious problems.

First, the hens are very poor layers yielding an average of 40-60 eggs every year.

Second, the roosters are extremely pugnacious and quarrelsome making it impossible to raise a yard of “Aseels” with several males serving a flock of hens.

The males will fight to the death and it is their nature.

(This is one issue which the anti-cockfighting activists are not aware of. Gamefowls are fighting birds by nature. They will fight to the death unless one of them runs away.)

Thus, while the Aseels were brought to the Southern Philippines by Arab and Afghan traders and missionaries from East Asia long before the Spaniards came, not very many of them have been bred.

Most of the pure ones are kept by Muslim farmers who consider these fowls as prized possessions. They are used in a popular sport among farmers in the Southern Philippines called “pauwak” or naked heel fighting.

The breeding roosters of winning families of the Aseels could fetch as much as P30,000 each.

Last year, I started breeding the “Aseels” in my farm in Paco, Kidapawan City.

I was able to acquire five pure hens and two roosters through the help of my Maguindanao friend Datu Musim Mamintal and his son, Jazim, who scoured the interiors of Cotabato and Maguindanao provinces to look for the real “Aseels.”

Today, I have already “harvested” about a dozen stags hatched in September and October last year which are now in the tie cord in the ranging area.

The sisters to these stags are already being bred to selected Aseel roosters brought to my farm by Jazim while many younger ones are still running loose in the yard.

Hopefully by the end of this year, the Braveheart Farms of Kidapawan City in North Cotabato will be the proud home of some of the most beautiful and authentic “Aseel” chicken in this part of the country.

(Photos show the newly “harvested” Aseel stags in the Braveheart Farms.)