A DIFFERENT TYPE OF QUALITY
by John Clements
I don’t intend to race my pigeons in 2015 but I shall not be idle. The latter part of 2014 and the whole of 2015 and 2016 is an essential part of my plan to rebuild the strength of my loft. No small loft such as mine can hope to be successful unless the loft is full of high quality birds. My hope is that 2017 will be my year of top quality. That is of course if the present pigeon situation is still OK, my health stands up and all goes to plan. In 2017 I intend to send 10 pigeons to the NFC Tarbes race and have 10 pigeons in the clock. This is a different measurement of quality than first prize winners. By then we will have a new president of the United States, the British General Election will be out of the way and the economy will either have crashed or still be standing. Getting back to more important matters such as pigeons, I am currently training my 20 or so late-breds from all points of the compass in all weathers as the initial part of my build up plan in an effort to find the quality I need. I have a lot of experience and have also made a lot of mistakes during my career in long distance racing. I intend to use the whole of my experience in order to break new ground and set the bar higher than it has ever been before.
For a very long time now my thinking has been based on consistency being a superior measurement of loft quality than first prizes. I couldn’t care less if I don’t win a race in 2017 or even if I don’t win a section in that year but what I do want is a strong team performance that blows my many critics away so much they will think my pigeons are on drugs.
This team idea is contrary to most of the current thinking where first prizes reign supreme because first prizes sell pigeons. First prizes may sell pigeons and capture the headlines but they do not reflect the strength and quality of any loft as a whole or the quality of the pigeons in that loft, so first prizes are for the most part a useless indicator when buying pigeons. What is really the truth of any loft in extreme distance flying is the rate of returns or the consistency of the loft and of course the real big test of how the pigeons breed for others.
Most fanciers look for a short cut to success. This ‘short cut’ usually means a short cut to winning. This ‘short cut’, in the view of many, is to pay a lot of money for pigeons based on the belief that the market always reflects what the top quality of the day is.
This is not so. I can tell them without hesitation the market hardly ever reflects what is good and what is top quality. An 800 mile pigeon flying to the Netherlands is not the same as a 700 pigeon flying to the North of England after crossing the sea alone. The English pigeon in most cases is superior the Dutch pigeon. The market does not reflects this what the market does is set a price of what people are prepared to pay, it is as simple as that. Discovering what is really good is better served by doing some research into results and evaluating who and what pigeons are performing, not what people are prepared to pay, but this is the long route to success not the short cut I have just mentioned.
What people are prepared to pay for pigeons from a loft that gets ten pigeons out of ten from Tarbes is open to question. Being the pessimist that I am, I suspect that average Dutch pigeons will still command a higher price than top traditional English marathon pigeons. That is the ‘mind set’ provided by slick advertising and huge promotion. It is not anywhere near the whole truth.
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Elimar - November 2014