Our Domestic Birds: Elementary Lessons in Aviculture

by John H. Robinson

Fig. 236. White Fantail Pigeons [28]

[28] Reproduced, by permission, from "Domesticated Animals and Plants," by E. Davenport.

Disqualifications. The practice of judging the relative merits of exhibition birds principally by a few striking characters tends to make breeders and exhibitors neglect many little things which affect the appearance of a bird. This is especially the case with exhibitors competing under judges who are partial to some conspicuous character. To prevent this, and to place the heaviest possible penalty upon serious faults that are easily overlooked, certain faults are made disqualifications; that is, a bird having any one of these faults is absolutely debarred from competition, no matter how good it may be in other respects.

There is general agreement as to the wisdom and justice of disqualifying for deformities or for mutilations of the feathers to conceal a fault. In regard to disqualifying for trivial faults, fanciers differ in opinion. Many hold that this has been carried to a ridiculous extreme in some cases. Thus, in all clean-legged fowls it is required that the shanks and toes shall be free from small feathers, stubs, or down. Most fanciers agree that conspicuous feathers and stubs should disqualify, but many consider that to disqualify for a minute bit of down, which can hardly be seen without the aid of a magnifying glass, is going too far.

Unless the judge has overlooked a disqualification (and this rarely happens), none will be found on a bird that has been awarded a prize. If in any class there is a bird which is not given a place, though apparently superior to any of the prize winners in the characters most distinctive of its variety, that bird usually has some disqualification. The list of disqualifications is too long to be given here. It is not the same throughout for all varieties. Exhibitors and breeders do not attempt to keep track of the disqualifications (which are changed occasionally) for any but the varieties in which they are especially interested.

Methods of judging. When exhibitions of domestic birds were first held, the awards were usually made by committees of two or three judges. The object in doing this was to insure impartiality and to make connivance between a judge and an exhibitor more difficult. It was found that this plan did not work well. Often the opinions of one man dominated, or, if the man could not have his way, the committee wrangled and took too long to make its decisions. So by degrees the committee plan was abandoned and a single judge made the awards in accordance with standards and rules agreed upon by associations of exhibitors and judges.

At first all judging was done by comparison of the specimens of each class entered in competition. That is the method still in general use in Europe and widely used in America. But to many exhibitors comparison judging seemed unsatisfactory, because by it only the winning birds were indicated, and exhibitors whose birds did not win usually wanted to know how their birds compared with the winners. To meet this demand score-card judging was adopted. In this method of judging, the characters to be considered are divided into sections, which are named in order on a card having corresponding blank spaces in which to mark numerical cuts for faults in each section. The score cards used at poultry shows where judging is done by that method do not indicate to which of several possible faults a cut applies, except that, having one column for shape cuts and another for color cuts, they show in which class the fault appears. In many educational and private score cards the names of the common faults in each section are printed in the space allotted that section, in order that the fault may be accurately checked. The use of cards with so much detail is not practical in ordinary competition.

The score of a bird judged by the score-card method is the difference between 100 (taken as the symbol of the perfect bird of any variety) and the sum of all the cuts made for faults. The common cuts for faults are ½ for a slight fault, 1 for a pronounced fault, and 1½ for a very bad fault. Occasionally larger cuts are made for serious faults. Theoretically the score is supposed to represent accurately the relation of a specimen to a perfect specimen, but really scores only represent in a general way the judges' opinions of the relative values of the birds in a class, and indicate to the exhibitor where the judge found faults in his bird.