Keeping Geese

Breeds and Management

Chris Ashton

• Publisher: Crowood
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781785000560
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Animal Husbandry
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Keeping Geese is a complete guide to the domesticated goose. It shows how this intelligent bird has been absorbed into different cultures throughout history, from the taming of the Greylag and the Swan goose to the exhibition of the mighty Toulouse. Written from thirty years of first-hand experience of keeping, breeding and exhibiting these birds, Keeping Geese gives an insight into their habits and behaviour. Pure breeds of geese, hand-reared, are tame, responsive and intelligent and reared well, they will give hours of interest and pleasure for life. Illustrated with over 160 photographs and diagrams, this comprehensive study of geese covers the following and much more: domestication of the goose from the wild, and development of the breeds; why keep geese - as garden pets, eggs, exhibition, table birds; getting started with geese; understanding geese - breeds, physiology and behaviour; management of adult stock; breeding, incubation and rearing goslings; recognizing and treating ailments.

Part I
History and Origins

Introduction

The goose was domesticated early and so has an old Indo-European name. Modern names derive from the Indo-European word ‘ghans’: this led to Old English gōs, plural gēs, German Gans and Old Norse gas (as in Skånegås). In Greek the word became khen, and in Latin, anser.

Unlike poultry which derive from the jungle fowl, domesticated geese are recognized in only a few colours and shapes. This is surprising in view of their long history of domestication, spanning hundreds, if not thousands of years in widely separated areas of the globe. This wide distribution is reflected in their exotic names. There is the Sebastopol from Eastern Europe with its white, curled feathers, the proud ‘African’ from the Far East, and the Pilgrim, first standardized in the USA. Yet despite this wide geographic distribution, all breeds and varieties of domestic geese probably originate from just two wild species: the Greylag goose (Anser anser) and the Asiatic Swan goose (Anser cygnoides).

Human selection has meant that the birds have gradually changed in form and colour from their wild ancestors, and there are now many different standardized breeds and commercial strains around the world. These are now identified in the database pertaining to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation Animal Genetic Resources (FAO ANGR, see Chapter 7).

1 The Origins of the Domestic Goose

Early Domestication

Charles Darwin considered there was archaeological evidence for the domestication of geese in Egypt more than 4,000 years ago, since Egyptian frescoes depict cranes, ducks and geese, recording their fattening and slaughter. The fresco of the six geese at Meidum shows Greylags, White-fronted and Red-breasted geese: now at the Cairo Museum, the painted plaster is dated as the Fourth Dynasty, 2575– 2355BC. The emphasis on geese is not surprising. The sacred animals of Amun, Lord of Creation, were the ram and the goose, kept at temples throughout Egypt, and although it cannot be certain that the Greylags were tame because paintings do depict the trapping of birds in the marshes, domestication would soon follow from the natural behaviour of the birds. They are thought to have been fully domesticated by the time of the Egyptian New Kingdom (1552–1151BC): for example, a flock of geese are counted and caught in Nebamun’s Geese at Thebes, painted in about 1350BC (British Museum).

There are other species of wild geese which could have been domesticated: the Bar-headed goose (Anser indicus) from India and Central Asia, the Bean goose, White-fronted and Pink-footed goose from Europe, and the Canada (Branta canadansis) from North America. In some of these, smaller size was a limiting factor, and perhaps also behavioural characteristics; Egyptian geese (Alopochen aegyptiacus), for example, tend to be aggressive.

In China, the wild Swan goose was the foundation species for the domesticated Asiatic breeds, which include the ‘Hong Kong goose’ (African) and the Chinese. The breeding range of the wild bird was formerly much more extensive than it is today, stretching from Japan and Korea into the interior of China, Mongolia and Russia. The wide range of the bird means that it could have been domesticated almost anywhere in East Asia, but the origin of the Chinese and ‘Africans’ is generally taken to be China. Delacour states that the goose was raised for many centuries in China, beginning over 3,000 years ago. Pottery models of ducks and geese dating back to about 2500BC suggest early domestication (Clayton, 1984).

Bean geese: it has been suggested that the domestication of the goose in China might have involved the Bean goose, in addition to the Greylag and Swan goose. Analysis of the karyotype of Chinese and African geese suggests otherwise (see Chapter 8).

The Swan goose, ancestor of the domestic Chinese goose and African goose.

European Geese

Ancient domesticated breeds, such as the Roman, are acknowledged to have been selected and developed from the Greylag. The species was once common throughout Europe and Asia, overwintering in North Africa, Greece and Turkey, as well as India, Burma and China (Owen 1977). There are two ‘races’, which are slightly different: the Western race is more orange in the bill, whereas Eastern birds are bigger, have slightly paler plumage and an attractive pink bill. Todd (1979) attributes this colour difference to natural selection in two once-distinct populations that were divided by the Pleistocene ice sheet. But as the ice retreated, the populations merged again so that today there are gradations of feather and bill colour across Europe.

The Greylag has several points favouring its selection for domestication. First, it did not always migrate, but ‘lagged’ behind, often failing to follow the truly migratory Pink-footed and White-fronted geese north to their breeding grounds. Second, its range is extensive, which offers numerous geographical possibilities for its domestication. It also has a particularly amenable temperament: it is more tolerant of disturbance by man than many others, it is the most adaptable of European geese in food requirements, and will nest closer to man than other species. One population breeds in Iceland and overwinters in Britain, whilst another group breeds in Scandinavia and central Europe and overwinters in southern Europe and North Africa.

Pink-footed goose (Anser brachyrhynchus). This species breeds in Greenland, Iceland and Spitzbergen, and overwinters in Britain and mainland Europe. It is not as large as the Greylag, and is more wary in the wild.

It also used to breed in the East Anglian Fens and the Netherlands before the destruction of the marshes. Weir (1902), for example, quotes Pennant from 1776:

The Eastern Greylag is a slightly larger and paler grey bird than the Western Greylag, with a slightly longer, pink bill – Sauwens-Lambrighs.

This species resides in the fens the whole of the year: breeds there, and hatches about eight or nine young, which are often taken, easily made tame, and esteemed most excellent meat, superior to the domestic goose.

As a gosling, the Greylag readily imprints on humans, and for this reason became the subject of research on goose behaviour by Konrad Lorenz. As a child he had been fascinated by geese and returned to them for material for his studies. Those who have kept and reared both wild and domestic geese will find it easy to understand why early subsistence people in Europe would have learned to domesticate these amenable birds and to develop their size on the farm.

More details of domestication emerge with written records, such as Homer’s reference in the Iliad to Penelope’s tame geese at Ithaca during the Trojan War (regarded as the twelfth century BC): ‘I have twenty geese at home, that eat wheat out of water, and I am delighted to look at them.’ At that time, according to Harrison Weir, Homer did not mention the hen.

By the fourth century BC the Romans kept a white goose developed from the Greylag. Lucretius wrote: ‘The white goose, the preserver of the citadel of Romulus, perceives at a great distance the odour of the human race’, and Virgil also ascribed the preservation of the Capitol to the ‘silver goose’: this is because in 390BC these sacred white geese saved the Capitol by their cackling warning about invaders:

The Gauls … climbed to the summit in such silence that they not only escaped the notice of the guards, but did not even alarm the dogs, animals particularly watchful with regard to any noise at night. They were not unperceived however, by some geese, which being sacred to Juno, the people had spared, even in the present great scarcity of food; a circumstance to which they owed their preservation, for the cackling of these creatures, and the clapping of their wings, Marcus Manlius was roused from sleep … and snatching up his arms, and at the same time calling to the rest to do the same, he hastened to the spot, where, while some ran about in confusion, … he tumbled down a Gaul who had already got a footing on the summit.

(Translation from Livy, AD59–17)

In Roman Farm Management by Marcus Porcius Cato (ed. F. H. Belvoir, 1918), writers from the second and third centuries BC gave accounts of goose keeping in Italy. The slave was recommended to select geese of good size and white plumage, because those with variegated plumage, which are called ‘wild’, were only domesticated with difficulty. Furthermore rearing goslings came with advice that would be equally appropriate to smallholders today:

… it is not expedient to assign more that twenty goslings to each goose pen; nor on the other hand must they be shut up at all with such as are older than themselves, because the stronger kills the weaker. The cells wherein they lie must be exceedingly dry.

Western Greylags at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, Slimbridge, Gloucestershire.

Columella, writing in the first century AD, also stressed that white birds were desirable. He described the fattening of the birds on crushed barley and wheat flour over a period of about two months, in much the same way as reported by Cato. Similarly Pliny Secundus (c. AD40, quoted in Harrison Weir) pointed out that, in Italy, white plume and down were preferred to the grey:

A second commoditee that geese yield (especially those that be white) is their plume and down … the finest and the best is that which is brought out of Germanie. The geese there be all white and truly a pound of such feathers is 5 deniers [3 shillings and 1 penny] … many complaints are made of officers over companies of auxiliary soldiers … they license many times whole bands to straggle abroad, to hunt and chase geese for their feathers and down [the wild goose chase, Weir suggests].

Even in Pliny’s time, the North European plain was producing the forerunners of the white Embden geese of today. Flocks of the birds travelled on foot from the north of France to Rome: ‘Those which are tired are carried to the front, so that the rest push them on by natural crowding.… In some places they are plucked twice a year.’

Pliny also remarked that ‘our people are aware of the goodness of their liver. In those that are crammed it increases to a great size …’ thus indicating that the practice of producing pâté de foie gras is an ancient mistreatment.

Despite the relative wealth of evidence of the goose in Roman culture, Italy is not noted for goose production today – indeed nor may it have been then. The goose is a central and north European bird, and references to the birds from Germany and France indicate that they were probably more numerous there, and better developed from the wild Greylag stock that was captured from the wild breeding population. It is just that the early written records were – and still are – available from Rome.

Goose Culture in Britain

It is quite likely that the goose was domesticated in Celtic cultures even earlier than in Rome. The bones of Greylag geese have been found in archaeological digs in the UK, but were they wild or semi-wild? Robinson (1924) records that when the Romans first invaded Britain in the first century BC they found tame geese, for Caesar reported that they were kept only for ‘sport’. Greylags are thought to have been part of the stock at Iron Age dwelling sites. There is a suggestion that the natives appeared to treat geese as sacred, but this situation cannot have continued; with domestication, the farmyard goose became part of the rural economy.

Whatever the geese were kept for, there is a great gap in the records between Roman and medieval times, due to the lack of documentation. Robinson suggests that both the Anglo-Saxon invaders and the Normans could have introduced geese – or the custom of keeping geese – to Britain, since these invading groups came from goose-rearing lands.

Harrison Weir researched manuscripts from religious establishments and leases and discovered the ubiquitous goose in everyday life after the Norman Conquest. The goose was involved in paying for the tenure of land; for example, Weir cites a reference to William of Aylesbury, who held land under William the Conqueror: apart from straw for the bed, both eels in winter and green geese in summer had to be provided for a king’s visit. Weir maintains that until the reign of Edward III that tenure was usually paid in kind, and in the list of requirements, Michaelmas goose was often specified.

In the section ‘Fairs, Qualities, Usefulness and Value’ Bishop Greathead’s [Grosseteste] Tratyse on Husbandry from the thirteenth century records that: ‘Ghees and hennes shall be at the deliverance of your baylyfe for lete, so ferme a goose for XIId. in a yere’ and that ‘evry goos shall answere you of VI ghoslynges’. In...