True breeding

[Mike Gilbert]

On that note, I actually watched one judge go down the line on W & BW cockerels and DQ every single one of them for having "foreign color" because their beards still had some white in them.
I forgot to mention before that I sell my clean-faced birds as "Non-Standard" Ameraucanas.  The Easter Eggers I sell are crosses from other breeds.

The APA Standard is messed up in a good number of ways.     In my opinion it is we the breeders who are the placeholders and guardians for the breed, not the APA.    The judge you mention did something dumb to make his/her job easier.  It was not the first time something like that happened nor will it be the last.     The country is full of blue egg chickens in all manner of characteristics that do not breed true for Ameraucana traits.   They are fine for backyarders, but we need to draw the line between them and what we have at some place, and the question is where.   So I'm real comfortable with the definition we adopted years ago. 

[John W Blehm]

But with your example the clean faced offspring aren't Ameraucanas because they don't meet the breed "standard" requiring muffs

Actually the SOP lists the absence of muffs/beard as a DQ.  Doesn't say it's not an Ameraucana.  On that note, I actually watched one judge go down the line on W & BW cockerels and DQ every single one of them for having "foreign color" because their beards still had some white in them.

I forgot to mention before that I sell my clean-faced birds as "Non-Standard" Ameraucanas.  The Easter Eggers I sell are crosses from other breeds.

I always figured when a bird was disqualified it had issues or defects so serious that it wasn't "qualified" or good enough to be judged in the class it was entered and essentially meaning it wasn't close enough to the Standard's description to be what it claimed to be.  I don't think I'd ever read the Standard's definition of "disqualification" before, so I did and although it is more vague than I imagined I think it is close to what I had in mind.  To me "non-standard" means it isn't an Ameraucana by definition (APA/ABA standards) and should be called something else.  A few decades ago when a standard definition arrived at for Araucanas our muffed and tailed ones became non-standard and found a new name.  Similarly birds without muffs or with yellow shanks that would otherwise be Ameraucanas are usually referred to as Easter Eggers.