Poultry Terms...... Culling, what does it mean?

I am going to start talking about terms and abbreviations used  in the world of owning poultry from time to time because when I first started with raising chickens and was reading posts on forums I often times had NO idea what in the world people were talking about.

Now keep in mind I am only about 3 years into raising and breeding poultry myself. And I have SO much more to learn and study. So I am offering these explanations in my own words, to the best of my knowledge, because there is after all NO poultry definition dictionary available.

Today's word ~ CULL

Cull is a term many who raise or breed poultry use and it can mean many different things to people. But often times people's first reaction is that Cull = Kill. This isn't always the case.

There are indeed many breeders working toward breeding to the Standard of Perfection* who will in fact kill whatever birds they are not using for breeding or showing purposes. This is done because they do not want to offer inferior stock to the public, in turn harming the breed they are working with. Which when all things are considered and you are striving for the betterment of the breed, I think, is understandable. It isn't the way I chose to do things, but I can understand why it's done.

Culling more often simply means removing a bird or birds from your flock. If it has a fault or an undesirable trait many breeders, or people raising poultry,  will simply sell that bird as "Pet Quality". This has it's ups and downs, in my opinion. There are plenty of people simply raising birds as pets, backyard ornaments, or for food/eggs that it is usually very easy to find extras that you have raised or do not want in your flock a good home. HOWEVER, often times people will turn around and breed those birds, which will reproduce whatever fault was there in the first place.

*Standard Of Perfection - Each breed of poultry/waterfowl that is recognised by the American Poultry Association has a list of "standards", very basically a list and description of exactly how each breed should look, including skin color, eye color, overall shape, feather coloring, angle of tail, and much MUCH more. There is also a Bantam standard published by the American Bantam Association