Since then, at every opportunity, we have tried to get a line on how they were originated and bred, up to today. We had been much interested in these fowl for the past 9 or 10 years, or longer, ever since we saw some of them back in 1930 or ’31. In two different issues of the Warrior some time last summer, we gave you the history of the Albany fowl one of today’s winning strains of fowl. Keeping pedigrees of animals and birds was begun simply because it furnished (for future reference) a record in writing of how outstanding individuals were bred, who their fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, and the proper place for their pedigrees is in the trash can. Yet, compared with today’s best cocks, they are positively jokes. They are famous today among paper fighters. He can write out the pedigree of any chicken on his yard and trace it right back to 1865 or ’70 not another drop of outside blood in all those years. All the damned things would do is stand there like fence posts and take whatever the other cock handed them.” Now, we happen to know a considerable amount of those fowl and their owner. He said, “I had to get rid of every drop of the blood. We asked him about some fowl he had tried out for three years. Recently, we talked to a well-known cocker and a competent man. If they aren’t good, a silly pedigree of long, pure breeding isn’t going to improve them a particle. What’s the difference how they are or aren’t bred, or who bred them? If they are good today, that’s what you want and need. And, all three of these men claim to have positive proof of their contentions. I can show you another who says he has letters to prove the best cocks Allen ever showed were crosses of Green’s Japs and still another who contends the best Allen ever fought, and this over a period of years, were not bred by Allen at all, but sent him each year by a New England saloon keeper. I can show you a man who claims to have letters from Allen in which he claims his strain was kept good by careful inbreeding. Let’s take the Allen Roundheads as a well-known example. A whole hell of a lot of us are not positive how last season’s chicks were bred, and them right on our own yard at that. Ninety-five percent of us gamefowl breeders don’t know how our own fowl are bred further than two or three generations back. If any man ever hit the nail on the head, it was Henry Ford when he said, much to the disgust of our scholarly element, “History is the bunk!” Much of the history taught in our schools is just that, or at its best inaccurate reporting of past events, and all game fowl history is absolutely bunk. Now, after a lot of developing into the history of present day families of fowl, it makes us laugh right out loud. Every time we read in a game journal or hear someone arguing about how a famous strain was bred, it used to make us smile.

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