N20 Allen & Ginter Prize & Game Chickens 19: White-Faced Black Spanish Cock

Recently I've been working my way through a batch of N20 1891 Allen & Ginter Fifty Prize & Game Chickens cards I picked up on eBay. This is the third card from that batch and my nineteenth card overall from the set.

This card features the White-Faced Black Spanish Cock. I featured his counterpart, the White-Faced Black Spanish Hen, way back in 2014. As I mentioned in that post, this breed originated in Spain and came about by breeding the chickens for larger earlobes until they took over their entire faces. This card is pretty far off-center, to the point where you can see text from the adjoining card along the right edge on the back. I am not too worried about that, although I imagine it will hurt the card's grading when I eventually send in all of my ungraded chicken cards to PSA for slabbing. But my goal is merely to have a full PSA-graded set. I don't have much in the way of aspirations as far as the actual grades themselves go. I just feel like cards this old should be preserved and a card slab feels easier to protect than a tiny bit of cardstock.

Close shot of the White-Faced Black Spanish Rooster, borrowed from FeatherSite

Here is a close-up of a White-Faced Black Spanish rooster's head. The internet tells me that these are one of the older Mediterranean chicken breeds, they lay large white eggs, and although they originated in Spain they are now considered rare in that country. An interesting site I came across in researching this chicken is The Livestock Conservancy, which tries to track and monitor the status of different livestock breeds. Some livestock breeds, like the White-Faced Black Spanish chicken, are in danger of disappearing because they don't have various traits that farms desire. In this breed's case, the breeding that led to their white faces also made them a little less hardy than other chickens, so they fell out of popularity once stronger breeds came about that could lay the same number / quality of eggs. They are listed as Critical on the Conservation Priority List.