Page 33 - SOMOS FOA #7
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breeding and selection can also be inferred couples. Moreover, the breeder must suppress
from the contents of his monograph “Cana- the urge to occasionally introduce new bre-
ricoltura” [1]. In part 5 of this book, he devo- eding material. My own experience is that,
tes 70 pages to the subject. He explains the even with birds that I have been breeding for
principle of selection, argues its necessity, a longer time, I have the tendency to mainly
and offers suggestions for its practical imple- notice their positive characteristics.
mentation.
Someone who looks at these birds with a
On the Transfer of Birds fresh perspective turns out to notice faults
more readily. To the two universal principles
In one of the translated articles, Zingoni des- of Zingoni, I would therefore like to add a
cribes a remarkable experience with transfe- third one: strict selection of your birds goes
rring stock to other breeders. Even after such better together with a friend whose expertise
a transfer, continued breeding in consangui- you rely on. Of course, you should then be
nity offers, in his opinion, the best guarantee prepared to assist your friends in the same
to produce high-level progeny. He calls it de- way.
plorable that breeders claim to have produ-
ced their own strain in a few generations, or Name Assignment
worse, that they have kept introducing speci-
mens from another line. It later emerged that the idea of creating a
frilled canary with a reduced size had already
After a few generations, according to Zingoni, been proposed twenty years earlier, in 1951,
only rigorous selection can produce the ex- by dr. Livio Susmel, a Croatian scholar from
pected results, following two universal princi- Rijeka, but highly Florentine by adoption. He
ples: without strict selection, consanguinity is described the desired properties in a book on
meaningless, and sentimentality is the worst aviculture, and suggested the name Fiorino.
enemy of selection. However, he mentions
one exception to this guideline. Dr. Susmel however did not succeed in com-
pleting the project in practice. Zingoni men-
When specimens from an established strain tions this honestly in his book, and describes
have been passed on to another breeder who in another article how he independently arri-
has maintained total consanguinity, and in ved at the same idea as Susmel. Both bree-
that parallel line a particular feature (length, ders have chosen the name of their creation
quality of feathering, shape of the arc, …) is in honor of its birthplace, the “Citta del Fio-
better than in the original line, he considers re”, or Florence.
the re-introduction of specimens from that
second line into the first one fully acceptable. In English, an appropriate name for this va-
riety would therefore be the “Florentine”,
This view presents the challenge of strictly but the Italian name is well established and
selecting and cleverly assembling breeding sounds more melodic.
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Somos FOA 33
