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Jul 5, 2022Liked by Feast of Assumption

Neat case study of intellectual dark matter! In the absence of an ongoing tradition of practice, the cumulative effect is that the knowledge of how to actually perform animal husbandry experiments is lost, but the high level summaries remain. There's a sort of analog link rot.

Further iterations would bring us to increasing levels of abstraction, increasingly divorced from practice. It is unlikely that we'd ever fully end up with husbandry essentially-theologians debating the true nature of the wattle, but one never knows!

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I owe an update as well, for the chicken forum presented me with more information:

"My understanding is that homozygous rose comb roosters do fine when they have a relatively small flock of hens, and mate with them all frequently. The problems tend to show up in large flocks, with hundreds of hens and the bare minimum of roosters (trying to get fertile eggs without feeding any extra roosters.)"

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