The presence of Karakul in Libya was, of course, connected to ambitious plans for settling the territory of Cyrenaica. Karakul farms, such as the one established by the Societá d’Oltremare at El Abiar, near Bengasi,[104] the largest of Cyrenaica’s cities, made sense only after the clearing and seizure of land undertaken by the pacification campaign.[105] Already in 1932, the year Cyrenaica was pacified, Maiocco had been asked by the head for animal breeding at the Sidi Mesri Experiment Station in Libya to deliver two Karakul rams and four ewes.[106] The animals arrived in the colony in May 1934 with certificates from the Zootechnic Institute of Prague, whose flock had been started, not surprisingly, with animals from Halle. Three months after the arrival of the six Karakul in Libya, one of the expensive rams died, and as a result the crossing experiments with the local fat-tail breed, the barbaresca, had to be conducted with a single Karakul ram. In subsequent years, the Istituto Nazionale de Coniglicoltura would ship rams from its own flock to local experiment stations scattered through the Italian Empire to cross them with local breeds.[107] Besides Libya, Alessandria pureblood Karakul would also find their way to Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, the Africa Orientale Italiana (Italian East Africa), as the region was to be known after Italia’s ruthless conquest of Ethiopia in 1936. But Francesco Maiocco was the first to recognize that, independently of the growth pace of his Alessandria flock, this would always be too small to accomplish the grand plans aimed at Karakul sustaining Italian communities in the semiarid areas of the empire.[108] The problem was more serious when the increasing difficulty of purchasing Karakul rams all over the world was taken into consideration. After the international sanctions against Italy for its Ethiopian invasion, Russia and South West Africa, the world’s two main producers, forbade any commerce with the country, and the rams were extremely expensive in Germany—12,000 RM in 1939, in a time of extreme scarcity of foreign currency in the Italian economy. All these difficulties supported Maiocco’s contention that the development of Karakul farms was completely dependent on his institute, which was not able to deliver more than a hundred purebred rams by the end of 1939.[109] In good conditions these rams would be able to fertilize in one year about 4,000 local ewes—not enough to satisfy the national demand for Persian fur pelts.
The solution was to be found in making intensive use of artificial-insemination techniques, which were being developed at the recently founded Lazzaro Spallanzani Institute in Milan, inspired by German and Soviet experiments.[110] It is good to remember that artificial insemination was also one of the main areas of expertise to be developed at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Animal Breeding. Telesforo Bonadonna, the director of the Lazzaro Spallanzani Institute, traveled to both Germany and the Soviet Union and brought back instruments with which he began to inseminate cows and sheep. In both Germany and the Soviet Union, Karakul had been used already as a model organism in artificial-insemination experiments. Bonadonna’s research in Italy would contribute to enlarging the community of scholars structured around Karakul.
Bonadonna reported results from his experiments with Karakul, which involved about a thousand ewes inseminated by a single ram in a year. If these numbers proved accurate, the 50 rams Maiocco promised to deliver to the African colonies would thus be able to inseminate 50,000 ewes in a year. In Libya the first experiments to establish the conditions for the use of the technique in the climate of Cyrenaica began in 1939 with local barbaresca ewes and several sperm concentrations from three Karakul pureblood rams. A total of 1,592 barbaresca ewes were inseminated, and the results were encouraging.[111] The four basic steps of artificial insemination—collecting, diluting, conserving, and inseminating proper—were to be undertaken under strictly standardized procedures. The main task facing experimenters was in fact to establish standards. If, for example, tropical conditions favored the collection of semen, with high temperatures avoiding thermal shock, they were nevertheless problematic for conserving semen at 0ºC. Ice wasn’t easy to obtain in Cyrenaica. And once again, it is important to notice that the status of Karakul in such experiments was double: it was an organism whose reproduction was being industrialized to increase profits from its production; but it was also a model organism standing for other organisms in exploring the general usefulness of artificial insemination.
Experiments were also conducted to investigate the possibility of shipping rams’ sperm via airplane from Milan to Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. As Bonadonna emphasized, this was to be considered the first shipment of sperm from Europe to African territories.[112] The experiment confirmed that changes in pressure had little effect on the motility or fertility of semen stored at 0ºC.[113] In line with the Italian push for the use of airplane as a tool of empire, Bonadonna put forward a vision of sperm from pureblood origin being distributed to the most remote areas of the empire. If airplanes had been decisive in Italy’s victory over the army of the Negus in Abyssinia, as well as in Cyrenaica over the Sanusi, Bonadonna now explored the possibility of using them to drop bottles containing bulls’ and rams’ sperm on parachutes in order to sustain productive animal husbandry operations.[114] Fascist Italy’s infatuation with aviation is a well-known subject, but its potential as a distributor of superior sperm in colonial dominions has never been appreciated. Mussolini liked to brag about the role of aviation as bringing a new order to the chaos of politics through its view from above, and he probably would have been equally proud of its ability to distribute higher forms of life to the vast territories of Grande Italia.[115]
104
105
On the details of creating a Karakul farm under Italian colonial administration, see “Disciplinare per l’allevamento degli ovini Karakul,” 1939, Archivo Istituto Agronomico per l’Oltremare (AIAO), fasc. 1972; “Relazione sull’allevamento degli ovini Karakul nella Libia Occidentale,” 1937, AIAO, fasc. 529.
107
The Somalian case was especially promising, since Frölich himself had already demonstrated the ability of the Somali breed for crossings with Karakul.
108
Francesco Maiocco, “L’Allevamento della Pecora Caracul per la Produzione della Pelliccia ‘Agnellino di Persia’ e sue Possibilitá di Sviluppo nell’ Africa Italiana. Necessitá del suo Allevamento al Fini Autarchici dell’ Industria Italiana dell’ Abbigliamento,” paper presented at the VIII Congresso Internazionale di Agricoltura Tropicale e Subtropicale, Tripoli, March 1939.
110
The institute was founded in 1937. See
111
A. Giacomint, “Risultati ottenuti in Cirenaica nel 1939 applicando la fecondazione artificiale negli ovine,” Fiera per lo Sviluppo Autarchico dell’Agricoltura Italiana, Atti della IIa Adunata Nazionale dei Veterinari per la Fecondazione Artificiale, Foggia, May 1940: 105–120. Detailed results are given of inseminating 1,592 barbaresca ewes with the semen of three Karakul rams. Fertility was 55% among mature ewes with open cervix, zero among ewes with closed cervix or genital disease, and 27% among virgins. At an environmental temperature above 30°C, fertility ranged from 28% to 64% with dilutions up to 1:6; below 30°C it ranged from 46% to 80%. Delaying insemination by 24 hours after the beginning of estrus lowered fertility from 57% to 5% among mature ewes, to 28.6% among among ewes with closed cervix or genital disease, and from 31% to 6.6% among virgins. Fertility varied from 55% to 72% with dilutions up to 1:4 and from 31% to 47% with higher dilutions. There was no consistent correlation found between fertility and semen dosage between 0.1 and 0.7 cm.
112
Telesforo Bonadonna, “Fecondazione strumentale e zootecnia coloniale,”
113
P. Venturi, “Ricerche sulla influenza della pressione atmosferica nella conservazione e trasporto a distanza dello sperma,” Fiera per lo Sviluppo Autarchico dell’Agricoltura Italiana, Atti della IIa Adunata Nazionale dei Veterinari per la Fecondazione Artificiale, Foggia, May 1940: 320–328.
114
Telesforo Bonadonna, “La Fecondazione Artificiale degli animali nell’ Africa Italiana,” VII Congresso Internazionale d’Agricoltura Tropicale e Subtropicale, Tripoli, March 1939.
115
Joseph Corn,