Breeding & Interbreeding?

[BlessedChaosHomestead]

I'll try to phrase this another way. The amount of loss of genetic diversity between two full siblings and a father-daughter or mother-son is exactly the same. If they are half-siblings the loss of genetic diversity is less so from a pure loss of genetic diversity breeding half-siblings is the "best".

If you breed full siblings there is a 50-50 chance of any specific gene being passed down to the offspring. If you breed parent-offspring there is a 75% chance of a specific gene being passed down because the parent and offspring share so many more genes. So if you have a superior parent you have a better chance of the superior genes being passed down with a parent-offspring match. That is why line breeding is so often used by breeders.

If you are not breeding for specific traits, full sibling matings are no worse than parent-offspring matings so I do not consider them a no-no. Actually half-sibling matings are superior to full siblings or line breeding if you are not after specific traits.


One way chickens have been kept on small farms and such for thousands of years is to keep a flock and raise your own replacements. This works for several chicken generations. But eventually they get so interbred that they start to lose fertility, productivity, and strong immune systems. So they bring in a new rooster to restart the genetic diversity.

How long they can go between bringing in new stock will depend on how many chickens are in the gene pool. The more chickens contributing the more diverse the gene pool is. Many of the hatcheries we buy from use the pen breeding method. They may have 20 roosters and 200 hens in one pen randomly mating. They can go decades without a significant loss of genetic diversity.

But choose your breeding birds carefully. Do not allow defective birds to breed. You do not want those in your flock genetics.

Yes, see that’s similar to cats. My grandmother, back in the 90’s used to have around 100 cats as people would just come dump them at her house as they knew she was an animal lover. There was no way she could spay/neuter them all so some small interbreeding issues started existing until my grandfather built a large pen for males and one for females.
(Not sure which was worse, living your life in a pen or running free but maybe being killed by coyotes.)
They all got old and died to my knowledge.
But she still has people randomly dumping at times. Had a kitten show up on her porch back in winter.

Anyway though in topic that’s why I asked. So we should be good right now. We have 50+ chickens growing and only one rooster atm.