Line-breeding and in-breeding

The first 3 photos below are of Skyhawk's son, Falcon.  He exemplifies the type of shama that I have bred and hope to breed. Like his father, Falcon has soft and aligned tail feathers.  He is more macho than his father and shows what can be achieved with careful selective line-breeding. He is one of my favourite shamas. The last photo is of Funkie's daughter.

This year, I am breeding him for the first time. He has been successfully paired him with Funkie's daughter as I hope to combine the best of Skyhawk's genes and Apache's genes.  BTW, Funkie is the son of Apache.  All of Apache's sons have exhibited great courage and display and, with luck, this will be passed on to the offspring from this pairing.

There is a person who has been breeding shamas for only 2 or 3 years who claimed not long ago that in-breeding and line-breeding ("line-breeding") produces only "nuts and fools". I regret that this shows a complete lack of understanding of the principles and results of selective breeding.

It is a fact that if a breeder starts with inferior stock, he is not likely to get anything special and the progeny will likely be inferior no matter how many generations he breeds his birds.  This is not line-breeding.  Just because this breeder's unknowledgeable attempts at line-breeding produced nuts and fools does not mean that the system itself is at fault. It is this breeder's implementation that was wrong. Anyway, if a breeder has only been breeding indiscriminately for 2 or 3 years, this can hardly be described as line-breeding.

This same breeder has recently said that he is out-crossing this year. Now, unless he has been selectively line-breeding and he has produced a strain of shamas, what he has been doing is not line-breeding and merely adding a new male is hardly out-crossing his stock.  It's merely carrying on the same indiscriminate breeding practices that he has been doing in the past 2 or 3 years and the results are likely to be the same.