ORIENTAL GAMEFOWL

CONTENTS : The Wildfowl; The Beginning of Pure-Bred Poultry. The World of Orientals; Oriental Gamefowl in America, Europe – France, Britain, Germany; Australian Gamefowl. Thai Gamefowl; The Thai Breeds; Thai Cockfighting; Ayam Bangkok;  Saipans; Vietnamese Gamefowl Ganoi;  Madagascar Games, Malgache; Russia – Kulang, Dakan;  South America – Brazil, Peru, Ecuador.

The Malays; Asils; Shamos; Kimpa; Yakido; Tuzo; Nankin; Echigo Nankin; Ko-Shamos; Yamatos; Chibi; Tosa Chibi.  Sumatras; Yokohamas; Cubalayas; Japanese Fowl History; Onagadori and Phoenix; Longtail Genetics; Shokoku; Ohiki; Kurogashiwa; Satsumadori; Minohiki; Koeyoshi; Totenko; Tomaru. Cockfighting and maintenance and much more with 300 illustrations in color.

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The subject on Shamos and other related breeds is a very comprehensive and complex one, relatively new and to some extent a mysterious one to the Western world – that is if one excludes the sparsely information in older literature on the famous Japanese Long-tail fowl - and research really has been very limited, probably due to the language barrier. Even books in Japanese have become available only just during the last 15 to 20 years, thanks to the efforts of some fanatic western poultry fanciers traveling the far eastern continent. But the complexity of the breed is mainly because of the multitude of varieties and subspecies developed in various different regions of Japan, as we will see in the following.

But no other country in the world has been devoted as much as Japan has been to the preservation and conservation of many of their national breeds, even to the extent to protect them by law, thus preventing the exportation of such species, ex. The Shamos were put under Japanese government protection in 1941. It is hard to say whether this has been beneficial to the mere existence and preservation of some of these breeds and might be questionable, thereby allowing such breeds only in the hands of the Japanese poultry world but also to greatly restricting the gene pool, which is necessary to preserve such fowl for future generations. However, due to global interest in the environment and economical as well as political interaction, Japanese authorities as well as breeders have become more flexible and encouraging over the last decade to share their rich heritage in rare and fancy poultry with the rest of the world, thereby making the export of hatching eggs and live birds to other countries more possible.

While Malays and Asils were mentioned frequently and on a regular basis in older literature, the Shamos seem to have first caught the attention of writers at the beginning of the 19th century. In Weir’s ‘The Poultry Book’ from 1904 and 1915 we find an account of the breed by Dr. H.P. Clarke of Indianapolis/USA, associating them with the Oriental Gamefowl from the island of Madagascar, the Malgache, a kind of “naked neck Malay” (described elsewhere in this book), but gives little background information about the distribution thereof. A collaborator of Clarke and avid cockfighting enthusiast was the renowned writer Carlos A. Finsterbusch from Santiago/Chile, who in his book “Cockfighting All Over the World” in 1929 traced the roots of the what was called ‘Siamese and Malacca fowl’ at the time and showed pictures in his work of Siamese Malay Games and Japanese Shamos of 13 lbs and more. However, at the same time while apologizing for the lack of detailed scientific fundamental and documented information, resorting to what was known to him already at the time, thereby acknowledging the accomplishments of Japanese breeders of developing a species that ultimately became a national treasure. Although Finsterbusch’s main interest was cockfighting, he recognized the variety in the breed and classified them into 4 groups:   ….. read on inside.