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Know Your Cock by Heart
Handle your cocks with tender loving care; they can appreciate and reciprocate love.
Know yourself is an age-old dictum in warfare. In cocking, you also have to know your cock.
After you have selected your champions, the next thing to do is to know them individually.
Man and rooster should get to know each other more. A good conditioner always endeavors to find out more about his cock. Know your cock and half the battle is won, as the great Chinese general Sun Tzu would have said.
It is not enough that you note your cock’s fighting weight. It is also important to know if he likes to be moved around more, or he fights better if just left on his own for days, say in a fly pen or on the tie cord.
One of the first things you should check on a newly acquired cock is his metabolic rate. You would want to know whether this particular cock gets fat or heavy easily or whether he needs more amount of feeds to stay in shape. One way of knowing the metabolic rate of your chicken is to set a standard amount of feeds for a certain weight group.
For instance, using my maintenance feeds of 50-50 pigeon pellets and concentrate, I feed 35 grams per feeding for cocks weighing 1.8 to 2 kilos. I can determine more or less the metabolism of the individual cocks by monitoring which ones get overweight, which ones fall under the ideal weight and which one maintain the right weight.
This knowledge is important once you get into the pre-conditioning and conditioning stages, as you will know then whether this cock needs more exercise and less feeds or the other way around.
Know the cock’s natural bio-rhythm. Know what it loves to do. Know the fighting weight, the right body feel, the right diet. Most of all, always handle your cocks with tender loving care. They are living things that can appreciate and reciprocate love.
Keep a sparring record. From it you can more or less judge the respective bio-rhythm of your cocks. An experiment conducted by RB Sugbo Gamefowl Technology showed that most cocks have about two weeks upside performance, two weeks downside. Meaning, they reach peak performance about once every month.
After peaking they experience a down curve for two weeks, or two sparring sessions if you spar your cocks weekly. Then, afterwards, they start peaking again.
This might explain the old tradition of timing the fight of a certain cock on a certain stage of the moon cycle. The lunar cycle is also 28 days or two two-week periods.
But a few cocks have a longer cycle of three weeks, and rare are the cocks that consistently performed well every week.
Know your cock well and it’s a way to victory.