The Livestock Conservancy

I thought that might be pretty useful for people to know.

So now I've read it while I was at the Livestock Conservancy and we did the Buckeye Project.

Jeanette Barringer there, my protege, who's done really great things for that organization, I'm very proud of her.

She encouraged me to start writing all this stuff down.

And then the other chapters have my name first and her second.

They still offer them for free download.

Now they call themselves the Livestock Conservancy.

And you go to their poultry page, and it's the chicken manual.

And so the other thing that I learned about, especially heritage breed sheep, is that they're really good pasture renovators and they're more willing to eat, you know, stuff that isn't grass than some of the other livestock species.

So, yeah, in my research of figuring out which sheep I wanted to get, I landed in the Livestock Conservancy's website, which then it became this whole website I didn't even know there were heritage breeds of livestock that used to be way more prevalent that now are like less common.

And so trying to keep certain breeds going is a conservation effort.

And so that obviously spoke to my like conservation interests.

They are the only heritage breed chicken created in Canada, and they are right at home in the more northern states in the US as well.

The Chantecler is currently listed in the watch category of the Livestock Conservancy's Poultry Conservation List.

Now, the story of the Chantecler has its roots in France, though the chickens themselves are Canadian.

In the late 1800s, an order of Trappist Catholic monks were expelled from the country by the army of the French Third Republic.

Right.

It can be difficult to find them.

Check the Livestock Conservancy's Breeders' Directory for stock.

You can also check the Chantecler Fanciers International Club.

It has nothing behind it, no organization or history that can come in and label that as a heritage.

I was at the meeting 15 years ago or 20 years ago, whatever, because I've also been a member of the Livestock Conservancy almost since its founding.

And we had a meeting in Virginia Tech pertaining to turkeys.

It was all about turkeys.

And I... begged them for two days not to do that, but they did it anyway.

So it became a huge marketing thing.

But with the help now of the Livestock Conservancy, we have written definitions of what a heritage is.

And to call a chicken or a turkey heritage, it must be a known breed that existed prior to 1950 and has been recognized by the American Poultry Association as a purebred chicken.