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60 – Purebred PIGEON
times carloads would travel around and talk and handle the birds,
put them up in show pens, have great fun and build comradery/
lifelong friends, and experience. At the shows we often used to sit
around a judging pen with fellow fanciers and discuss the breed
along with knowing and teaching what a good stock bird looked
like and various faults that were very hard to get rid of and other
faults that you could work with and eliminate as you went along.
To judge you had to apprentice judge with an experienced judge
and have 5 years of showing the breed with success before taking
on a small show. That is how much of the knowledge was passed
down. We are losing our experienced judges and a lot of people do
not want to take the time to study the standard or apprentice judge
these days. I was surprised by breeders that have zero judging
experience want to judge a major show. That is something you
wouldn’t even ask just a few years ago. A qualified judge would
explain the placings and if you were watching the judging you
would pick up valuable information.
All of our knowledge came from interaction first hand with
others and the pigeon magazines that were packed with quality
information. No hiding behind a screen googling your questions
and then posting the answers as if it was your own information.
I found either the guy searching copied it wrong, or the person
who wrote it in the first place was wrong too often. It’s just not a
very reliable place to get information for the most part. There is
good information on the breed sites but you often have to bite your
tongue at some pictures and postings. The best ones have long time
experienced breeders in numbers participating and helping the new
people understand the breed.
As the hobby goes we want to continue to get new breeders
going and get correct information to them to retain them in the
hobby. Our site administrators have to be non biased and knowl-
edgeable people so that we don’t lose a potential new breeder or
club member to a keyboard warrior who almost always battles
against a mountain of valid evidence and when soundly corrected
as peacefully as possible, just leaves the conversation without an
apology or saying, “I guess you have a lot of evidence here and
I was wrong.” Just way too hard to admit these days and so very
easy to ignore when hiding behind a keyboard. I personally post
very little these days compared to years past. It’s nice to look at the
pictures but hard to teach or pass down experiences.
Myself and older friends don’t teach or hand down informa-
tion from what we googled online. We hand down our experiences
we had over many years observing and breeding pigeons in our
loft at the shows and select sites. There is no short cut and there
are too many variables that we encounter along the way for every
bit of information to be on the Internet.
Watch your sites for bad behavior and try to continue to teach
from experience like we used to. Raising pigeons in the many
different breeds over the years has been an amazing experience,
very fun and I have met a lot of people around the world through
the hobby. We want to maintain a comradery of fellow fanciers for
the future.
I still get handwritten letters in the mail from long-time fanci-
ers – in fact I got one today from an old friend Rick Abrahamzon
from Fredric, Wisconsin discussing the current events, friends that
are long passed away, breeding of the birds he still has, along with
an interest in the breeds I have and colors I am working on.
It’s a great hobby, lets try to maintain the comradery and
lifelong friendships that come of it. •