Selection and purchase method of meat breeding pigeon

The ultimate goal of raising meat pigeons is to produce edible pigeons and obtain economic benefits, so the quality and low production performance of meat breeding pigeons are the key to the success or failure of raising meat pigeons.

Variety selection

As mentioned earlier, there are more than 40 breeds of meat pigeons, but there are not many breeds raised in China at present. Most of the farms are mainly hybrid king pigeons, while the numbers of purebred king pigeons and Shiqi pigeons are small, and the numbers of other breeds are even less. Therefore, new meat pigeons do not blindly pursue purebred meat pigeons, as long as they can choose and buy better quality hybrid king pigeons, they can achieve the purpose of producing squab.

Appearance selection

The selection and purchase of breeding pigeons should first be in line with the breed characteristics of this breed. For example, the American king pigeon should have a short, chubby body, a wide chest and a round back, and a short and warped tail that resembles a "hen"; a stone pigeon has a long body, long wings, and a long, straight tail shaped like a banana. Secondly, the breeding pigeon is required to develop well, have a strong physique, have a wide forehead and short mouth, have big eyes, a deep chest and protruding forward, a keel straight, a wide and long back, and a large and soft abdomen; the pubic bone of the male pigeon is hard, the pubic bone of the female pigeon is soft and wide, and the feathers are smooth and moist, close to the body.

Weight selection

When buying breeding pigeons, most new meat pigeons like to choose large ones as breeding pigeons. However, from the actual production situation, the breeding pigeon with too large body size has the advantages of heavy body, difficult mating, low fertilization rate, easy to break eggs during hatching, and the total reproduction rate is not high; the reproduction rate of breeding pigeon with smaller body size is relatively high, but most of them have poor feeding ability. The commodity rate of squab is relatively low. Therefore, it is appropriate to choose a moderate size as a breeding pigeon, the general male pigeon weight 6500800 grams, female pigeon weight 55000g is appropriate.

In addition, the selection and purchase of backup pigeons should also pay attention to individual collocation. Usually the male pigeon individual is relatively large, the female pigeon individual is relatively small, if the intentional selection of individual size often causes serious sex ratio imbalance, resulting in unnecessary losses.

Age selection

The breeding pigeons provided by general meat pigeon farms can be divided into backup breeding pigeons and productive breeding pigeons. the former is breeding pigeons from 1 to 4 months old, and the latter is paired breeding pigeons after 5 months old. The price of backup breeding pigeon varies with different ages, and the price is cheaper than that of producing breeding pigeon. Therefore, many new breeders choose to buy reserve breeding pigeons in order to save money, but the reserve breeding pigeons have poor adaptability to the environment, easy to get sick, and are difficult to raise. If they are lack of breeding experience, it is easy to cause breeding failure. Therefore, new meat pigeons should buy 5-6-month-old matching breeding pigeons, as long as these pigeons are carefully reared, most breeding pigeons will lay eggs in 15-20 days into the human breeding period, and the risk of breeding is relatively small.