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- #11
Understood thank you very much.Pretty close, yes.
What they probably really did:
Breed white hens and red roosters, raise a bunch of daughters, keeping track of which daughters came from which parents. See how well the daughters lay.
Take the white hens and the red roosters that produced the very best daughters, and breed each of them to mates of their own color, to get more white chickens and more red chickens.
Using that new generation of white chickens and red chickens, breed the white hens with the red roosters and keep track of the daughters so you can find which parents were the best...
Repeated over and over, for many years.
They eventually ended up with the current set of chickens, that are probably not recognizable as any specific pure breed, but that are very good for producing ISA Browns.
Looking at that chart in the first post, I would say that A and B would be two lines of white chickens. Breeding them together gives the white hens that become the actual mothers of ISA Browns. C and D would be two lines of red chickens. Breeding them together gives the red roosters that become the fathers of ISA Browns. Each year they are also breeding A roosters with A hens, and B roosters with B hens, to get the pure As and Bs they will be crossing next year (and C roosters with C hens, and D roosters with D hens.)
The only thing that keeps you from doing the same thing yourself: space to raise a lot of chickens, money to pay for the housing and feed for all the chickens, and how much time you are willing to put into the project.
Sort of yes, sort of no. Each of the lines of chickens (A, B, C, D) would be like a breed, in that it can reliably produce more chickens like itself. But it is not a breed that has a name, gets sold by hatcheries, raised by private breeders, entered in chicken shows-- so in that sense it is not really a "breed" as we usually use the term.