THE IMPACT OF BREEDING & RACING BY THE FANCIER ON PHYSICAL TYPE

by Jim Emerton

It is well documented that I used 4 DVH STICHELBAUT based birds bred from the 1970s base of Michel Descamps, regarded as the premier nucleus of the inbred strain, since he kept novel intros to a minimum. Taking my birds out to 879 miles, I bred many small/medium dark chequers and some velvets - influenced to a degree by the phenotype of my originals, the genome, and the severe progeny testing I subjected them to. A few stood the evolutionary test of time and survive today in strain form, many generations later. Recently I have, via PJLOFTS, introduced my pals to many direct DVH based birds from SCHLEPPHORST in Germany. Both our families have a few intros, yet many of the ancestors are the same DVH base e.g. WARE YZEREN/YZEREN KENNEDY/REMI OF 54 - see THE HISTORY OF THE BELGIAN STRAINS VOL 11. Now these birds, raced for years in hot competition over shorter distances are as a rule much larger and bolder looking physical specimens, and a work of great beauty from a master breeder. The test will be to blend some in and experiment out to Barcelona International, pure and fixed in with mine. I think that the fancier, with selection, has a huge bearing, with the environment, on the mental/physical type of the pigeon.

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Elimar - February 2015