starting points

It is my belief that the imported chicks from Indonesia suffer from serious inbreeding. Therefor, my first effort is to establish a viable "dutch" population. My main criteria are that the birds are healthy, well feathered and vital.

When crossing with other breeds to improve vitality, there is a great risk of losing pigmentation. I have therefor chosen to use Sumatra's, since this breed is also rather pigmented (an alternative could be the Belgian game ?). Although Sumatra's have a different model altogether, they contribute very much to the strength of the population.

the pedigree stock

The first pure cemanis arrived in the Netherlands as hatching eggs on three different occasions. Due to unfavourable conditions during transportation, hatching results were very poor.The first batch resulted in one female chick in April 1998. This hen was called "Black Tornado", because she would follow us everywhere and usually arrived in the house before we did.

To be able to start breeding, we mated Black Tornado to a pure Sumatra cockerel, donated by John Tax from Nuenen. This cockerel's task is to improve viability, hatchability and feathering in the somewhat degenerated breed.

In january 1999,the second batch of imported eggs again resulted in only one chick, fortunately a male. This young boy was hard to keep in the coop; his favourite pasttime was to sunbathe on our neighbours lawn. That is how he got his name "Escapy"

Finally, my last batch of imported hatching eggs resulted in 2 females and 2 males, in september 1999. Although I am not quite certain about the origin of this last batch of eggs, I am presuming that the chicks that hatched are all related and I therefor call them the "Kedu family"

This last presumption may be somewhat risky, because in fact all eggs from all three batches come from the same village and might be related. But for the breeding program, I am assuming that I have original birds from three different families: "Tornado"(T), "Escapy"(E) and "Kedu"(K). The Sumatra birds are the outsiders (S).

Breeding system

I have started to give the birds 4-letter codes; each letter representing the family of one grandparent. A pure Kedu-family member has code KKKK; a cross between Tornado and Kedu is TTKK etcetera. In this way it should be possible to keep families apart, and to avoid too much inbreeding.

© The Cemani site; by Jan Steverink