Arab Families (1950)

by GRACE DASHIELL

(Western Horseman June, 1950)

There are definite and noticeable variations in the conformation of Arabian horses. Most of these can be traced to the influence of the three main family strains. The Muniqui strain seems to be responsible for the tendency of many modern individuals to fall short of the standard of perfection we like to see in the Arab. This strain has been mixed for the last half century to such an extent that the true classic Arab is difficult to find in any large number today.

Today there is more concern about families than any other phase of Arab ownership. Slowly and surely, there is a concentrated movement to save the remaining classic Arabian horses and, from this priceless nucleus, to reproduce enough of the right kind to save the type for posterity. There is a world-wide return to classic strain breeding. Methods which were practiced for centuries by the purists among the desert tribes and by the master breeders of Arabia and Egypt are again being followed with most gratifying results. Classic stallions are being leased in new territory, and mares are being taken long distances to others. Arabs which are bred within either the Kehilan or the Seglawi, the two distinctive classic strains, or a combination of the two, are being produced. In these are found a well balanced blending of strength and beauty, proving beyond any doubt that this method of Arab breeding is more than just a theory.

Attempts are made to justify mixing the families and to disprove pure-in-the-strain breeding by reference to the unbelievable and amusing tale about the families being founded with the Prophet’s five thirsty mares, which stopped their mad dash for water when Mohammed’s bugler sounded the call to halt. Also, they call attention to the fact that an Arab takes its family name from that of the lower line of the dam only. This was done by the Bedouins in recognition of the most important line. However, these critics fail to go on to explain that it is customary to place the family strain under the name of each Arab on a pedigree for generations back, especially through the great grandparents, and usually six or more generations. When this is done, a clear pattern of the conformation and breeding of the individual under study unfolds.

Advanced pedigree students and serious breeders make out pedigrees on unborn foals when studying sire selection, all complete with families, as an important phase of Arab production. Knowing the characteristics of the various families, they are able, with surprising accuracy, to predict the conformation of the future foal. A basic knowledge of the science of genetics is most helpful. It is customary to study any faults in the mare and aim to correct them in the foal through the sire. Here again, definite knowledge of the family influence is of first concern. Knowing that the genes do not always take the same pattern (except in identical offspring such as some twins, triplets, etc.), any horse being a product of his ancestors and the gamble involved in genetics, the wise breeder looks to the purity of bloodlines for greater surety of success, this cutting down the percentage of chance.

The most important book in the library of the classic breeder is a copy of the early Arabian stud book, which lists the descriptions and family strain of each Arab, the latter in accordance with the practice which was followed by the Bedouins for centuries. The Arabian Horse Club of America discontinued the strain name in the last two editions, Volumes V and VI. As a result, the early copies are in great demand and priced many times their original cost. Many feel that the families should be in the stud book for those who desire this information. The rest could ignore them.

Breeders and buyers are securing copies of the reprints of the books of Brown, Davenport and Borden in their search for information. Some are fortunate enough to have a copy of Lady Anne Blunt’s book, Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates, which was published in 1879 and gives much information on families, including a large chart of the family strains. Still others have copies of the Selby brochure (published 1937), the Dickinson catalogs, the 1908 catalog of Davenport, and the 1925 catalog of the Maynesboro Arabian stud, all of which give detailed information on families. Some seekers of knowledge have borrowed copies of the original stud books and have written the strains in the last two volumes. Issues of THE WESTERN HORSEMAN which contain articles and pictures by Carl Raswan are highly valued and used as constant reference. Only Raswan himself knows how many marked pedigrees he has filled out in answer to requests, but they must number many hundreds. Others beat a path to his door where he cheerfully gives more information, taking precious time from his writing.

KEHILAN

Historians agree that the original Arabian horse was of the Kehilan type. His body was rounded, muscular, masculine and short coupled. His throat was wide to accommodate a large windpipe which carried oxygen to good sized lungs which were housed within a deep, broad chest. He had an excellent middle with a deep girth and well sprung ribs.

Dharebah AHC 3848, a classic type Arab mare, 1/2 Kehilan and 1/2 Seglawi. She traces entirely to Davenport importations. Photo by the author.

The bone of his legs was fine, but dense, and the tendons were large and well defined. His shoulders were sturdy with a remarkable slope to strongly muscled withers. His short back was joined to his quarters with a short, heavily muscled loin, thus making him a good weight carrier. His joints were large, strong and clean of meatiness. He had long, well muscled forearms, short cannon bone, powerful gaskins and deep, broad quarters, all of which gave him a powerful, extended stride. He was and is the horse of endurance. His jaws were deep and clean. His wedge shaped head tapered to a small muzzle having large, expressive, thin nostrils. It was distinguished by pronounced “tear bones” and was chiseled and full of detail about the lips an nostrils. Summing it up, he was a good horse by any standard. Admittedly, any breeding methods which destroy these good characteristics of the Arabian horse to any noticeable degree are wrong and should be discarded.

Today, the Arab which is bred chiefly within the Kehilan strains for more than four generations is an exact replica of his distant, classic ancestors, proving beyond any doubt that the Arab’s conformation is definitely influenced by pure in the strain breeding. The Kehilan matures slowly and increases steadily in beauty until eight and usually up to 12 years. One of their most noticeable characteristics is a lower head carriage, which makes them ideal sires in the production of cutting horses and Stock Horses. Stockmen who do not like Arabs with the higher head carriage, lighter bone and longer lines would do well to secure Arab stallions of predominately Kehilan bloodlines.

An excellent example of the pure Kehilan type is the chestnut stallion Rasraff. His parents, *Raffles and *Rasmina, his four grandparents are Kehilan. And many others that are predominately Kehilan are being produced each season. These excellent breeding stallions are able to stamp their get. The Kehilan add more bone, shorten back and loins and give more muscle over the back and, in general, more muscle throughout, plus more depth and width to foals of mares which might lack either. Breeding within the two classic strains is being practiced by leading breeders in the United States and other countries, and these Arabs are consistently commanding the highest prices on the market.

Ibn Hanad AHC 4165, sire Hanad AHC 489, dam Gamil AHC 1427, the classic type Arabian. Both sire and dam were of the Seglawi strain. Photo by the author.

SEGLAWI

Occasionally highly refined horses appeared among the early Arabians. Through selection and by crossing the finer with the finer, by inbreeding and line breeding, a distinct type which had finer, longer (but still rounded) lines evolved from the primary Kehilan type. His action was more animated, he was more spirited, his tail was like a gay plume, and he carried his head noticeably higher.

His head was slightly longer and not as broad, but it had more bulge and dish, although, like the Kehilan, he had a clean, chiseled face with prominent tear bones and much detail about the lips and nostrils. He became the showy picture horse which the Bedouins admired as they gathered before their tents in the desert. He was often represented on canvas as the ideal beauty type. The present day Arab, which is bred chiefly within the classic Seglawi strains of several generations, is also a picture in duplicate of his original Seglawi ancestors.

Breeding back to the classic type is one of the features of breeding the Arabian horse which makes it so rewarding and so fascinating. The breeder has a sacred responsibility to preserve this species of horsedom and to mold this plastic clay in the image of his beautiful classic ancestors. To do otherwise, thus destroying the reputation of the Arab for endurance, beauty and purity of bloodlines, is a sin against his trust.

An outstanding example of the ideal Seglawi type is young Ibn Hanad, said by many to be the most beautiful Arabian horse which they have ever seen and acclaimed by that noted authority, Carl Raswan, to be “the most beautiful Arabian stallion which has been produced in the past 40 years.” His parents, Hanad and Gamil, are Seglawi; also his four grandparents and all but two of his great grandparents, which were Kehilan. Stallions such as Ibn Hanad add grace and beauty to foals whose dams are heavy boned or on the plain side. They give finer, slightly longer, rounded lines. They beautify the head and animate the action. Their gaily arched tails wave like a royal banner. Truly they are the peacocks of the Arabian horse world. They are the showy, parade type. To have one of these proud, lovely creatures as a riding companion is to enjoy one of life’s most enjoyable experiences. More Seglawi type foals, which are bred almost wholly Seglawi for four or more generations, are arriving each season as this breeding program gains momentum.

MUNIQUI

According to historical accounts, in the first half of the 6th century, during the reign of Mohammed, some of the Prophet’s warriors returned from war riding foreign stallions in place of their Arab mares which they had lost in battle. Some of the Bedouins crossed these stallions with Arab mares to produce a larger, racy Arab which would be most useful in warfare because of its additional size and speed. Here again, through selection, inbreeding and line breeding, a definite type was produced which was larger, more angular, but plain. They sacrificed beauty for speed in this Arab, which became known as the Muniqui Hedruj. The early purists, then as now, did not believe in mixing this blood with the Kehilan and the Seglawi. It’s as simple as that.

Today, there is not one pure Muniqui Hedruj in the United States. However, being intensely inbred in passing, he has stamped his characteristics in many of the present day Arabs, thus causing their conformation to fall short of the standard of perfection set up for the breed. In fairness, most of the novice breeders did not realize what the effects of the Muniqui blood would be. They did not know how to produce the classic Arab, but they are learning.

Matih AHC 469, dam of Muniq. Photo by Raswan.

Muniq, sire Nasim AHC 541, dam Matih AHC 469, the oblong, angular race type. Both his sire and dam were of the Muniqui Hedruj strain.

Produced by a Muniqui Hedruj sire and dam, the bay stallion, Muniq, is a striking example of this type, his breeding being planned with that object and to prove that the Arab can be bred back to type, in this instance the Muniqui such as the Bedouins originally produced. Muniq is strong in type because he traces on both sides through his sire, Nasin, and his dam, Matih, both registered Muniqui Hedruj, to many of the same Muniqui Hedruj Arabs. Both great grand dams are Nazlet. Both grandsires trace to Kismet and Nazli, Nazli also being the dam of Nazlet. Out of 16 great great grandparents, seven are Muniqui Hedruj, the seven being *Nimr, *Namoi (Naomi), Khaled, *Nazli, *Nimr, Khaled, *Nazli; six others out of the 16 are Kehilan, which should give Muniq great endurance. He attracted much attention at the 1948 Pomona all Arab show, since he was the most extreme Muniqui Hedruj type present.

Image of Khaled by George Ford Morris

The true Muniqui Hedruj is a splendid type. This type should also be bred pure, since it is especially useful in crossing with the Thoroughbred to produce the Anglo-Arab, which meets with much favor among riders who like the higher, thinner withers and the larger size.

Two other principal strains among the Muniqui are the Jilfan and the Sbaili. The Jilfan are tall and leggy, having a long back and a croup which is often higher than the withers. The Sbaili (being a Seglawi cross) are handsome and are often mistaken for the Seglawi, but they have smaller eyes and are narrow between the jowls, sometimes only one finger wide. Their hock action and tail carriage are exaggerated, leading some to consider addition of this blood to correct a sloping croup and a low tail set. But, unfortunately, the narrow throat, small eyes, longer loin and smaller middle are oft times a costly accompaniment.

The eyes of the Muniqui, which sometimes do not match, are smaller and set higher. The bulge may be too low and the face too smooth, lacking distinct tear bones and other detail. The Bedouins always look to the head for signs of good breeding. In judging a good Arab, they measure the throat and space the head, check the chest and place three fingers between the ribs and the point of hip, the length of the loin governing this space.

The aforementioned Muniqui characteristics, and others which produce some Arabs which are not put together right, will be found in varying degrees in the Arabs of mixed families, depending on the number of generations they are removed from Muniqui. Alert observers are able to spot Muniqui blood, especially in the first three generations. Then they check the pedigree for verification.

HAMDANI

The Hamdani, which is a Kehilan strain, have a wide throat and large, intelligent eyes, but their profile is somewhat straight and their muzzle slightly heavier. Although a splendid type, known for strength and endurance, those interested in finer heads and smaller muzzles do not breed this line. Also, the Hamdani do not generally cross well with the Hedruj since they have a larger, longer, plainer head. From characteristics such as these a breeder should know how to avoid disappointment in foals, some of which are pretty as youngsters but get progressively plainer with maturity.

There are some Arabian mares and stallions in the United States which have been bred wrong during most of their careers. It is these Arabs of pure strains which the purists are happy to secure (even in their old age) to prove their ability to produce beautiful classic Arabs when bred right.

Many Arabian horses of mixed families approach the classic type, as a large per cent of them are only 1/8, 1/16 or 1/32 Muniqui. It is among these that we find good sized Arabs which please the rider who likes a large Arab of the Thoroughbred and Morgan types. Many of these mares are capable of producing a classic type foal through proper sire selection, recognizing that we make improvement through the sire. Mistakes in sire selection may result in a foal which will be plainer than either the sire or the dam. A mare which is 1/8 Muniqui can produce a foal four generations from Muniqui. This filly (1/16) can produce a foal of classic type. When all of the blood is good with the exception of 1/16 or 1/32 or less, then the influence of the unwelcome strain is tapering off. However, classically bred stallions are priceless in this program. The fact that more breeders understand this feature of breeding makes the future of the Arabian horse most encouraging. Now many are aware that the present day Arab can be used in a program to breed back to the beauty of the original classic Arab. It is here that the early stud book with the families is of such great value.

Due to lack of knowledge, many buyers shy away from the mere mention of Muniqui. It is here that an educational program would be of definite value to the breeders who are mixing the families. As it is, visitors measure throats, study heads and check conformation in general. The novice buyer is more selective and more educated than formerly. He has studied differences and judged conformation wherever the Arab appears. Some breeders are producing Arabs which meet the standards of the ideal Arab. The observer is quick to notice these horses. There is no weight in any statements to the contrary once he has seen them for himself. A study of pedigrees later merely verifies his find. Buyers are indicating a preference for Arabs with pretty heads and well balanced bodies. More breeders will swing to meet this challenge. In the long run, it will be the best thing that ever happened for the good of the Arabian horse. And whatever benefits the breed will eventually benefit the breeder.

Preservation Breeding and Population Genetics

by Michael Bowling © 1995
from CMK Record XI/2 Spring ’95

(This discussion is based on outline notes for the talk I gave at the 1994 Annual Meeting of the Arabian Horse Historians Association. The timeliness of the topic is underscored by a comment from the outgoing AHHA president, Carol Schulz, that at least 90% of the Arabian foals registered in the last several stud books are of generalized “show horse” lines, representing no particular breeding direction or identity. This does not say anything against the show horses, but makes it clear that all other aspects of the Arabian horse–and that includes straight Polish, Egyptian, Russian and Spanish–must be divided among less than 10% of current US breeding activity.)

AZZ (Ibn Nura x Bint Azz), shown here with Lady Anne Blunt, was the last of her line. Lady Anne sent the mare to England in the vain hope that more sophisticated veterinary care might preserve this branch of Dahman Shahwan. (NBGS)

What do we actually mean when we talk about “preserving” a genetic stock? The object of the exercise is not simply, or even chiefly, keeping names in pedigrees; pedigrees are merely a tool which may aid in evaluating the structure of a breeding group. It is obviously possible to breed in a preservationist sense with stocks that don’t even have recorded pedigrees. It is also perfectly possible to have a name present in pedigrees, while no modern representative carries a gene from the individual in question.

The goal of preservation breeding is to keep in the world the traits, characters, hereditary factors which make one aspect of a breed or species different from another–in short, to preserve genes for the future. Preservation breeding carries the unspoken assumption that the “preserved” genes will benefit a larger population in future; defined breeding groups have value and identity in their own right, but in another sense they are being maintained for future use.

This brings us inescapably into the realm of population genetics: the aspect of the science of heredity which considers the behavior of genes over time, as affected by particular mating systems. Population genetics is a mathematical and highly theoretical discipline–frankly in graduate school I found it the least compelling aspect of genetics–until you have a real problem to which it applies, when the charts and equations suddenly take on life and meaning.

Much of population genetics theory is derived for the special case of “random mating”–defined as a situation in which every individual in a population has equal probability of mating with every other individual of opposite sex. Clearly this is an imaginary construct to simplify the math. Real-life matings are constrained by geography, finance, fashion, etc., any of which will lead to wide use of some lines or individuals, and neglect of others, and so directly to loss of genetic diversity.

Any individual horse standing before us is the product of its genetic makeup interacting with all the environmental factors it has encountered. Nutrition, training, medical care–all these come under the heading of “environment,” not just weather and soil conditions. Genetic diversity buffers the population against the effect of environmental change; it is what gives a breed the potential to respond to new conditions. Diversity includes the physical and mental traits of the traditional Arabian; “new conditions” in our context may include things like an increased appreciation of the traditional using and companion Arabian horse.

A breed is the sum total of all its individual horses. Historically the genetics and veterinary literature has treated members of breeds as if they were interchangeable average mathematical units. Fortunately with the recognition of genetic diversity as a positive good, an alternative approach is gaining currency. Preservation breeding emphasizes that a breed must not be viewed as the average of all its “random mating” individuals–in order to preserve we must identify and try to understand the differing strands of its makeup.

I have referred before to that useful metaphor of “the tapestry you are preserving.” One may “preserve” almost anything, from a near-perfect wall hanging which just needs to be cleaned and protected from future damage, down to a scrap of authentic thread which may be very useful for repair or reinforcement of a more complete but related fragment.

A static image of conservation or preservation could be misleading (any metaphor however useful is a comparison, not a description). We do need to remember that in Arabian horse terms there are no perfect tapestries, and clarify one difference between preservation breeding and other kinds of conservation (working with animals even differs from preserving rare plant stocks): Genes (DNA molecules) are essentially unchanged over the generations; individual horses are transient, ephemeral, fleeting combinations of genes. The tapestry image works so long as we keep in mind that the process is analogous, but the object of the process is quite different.

What classes of fragments might we conserve? All will be arbitrary, defined in some historical terms–“species” at least in the ideal is a natural, biological classification, but we are not working at the species level. Fortunately we can describe any group in biological terms once we’ve defined it.

  • Large closed groups: this is certainly the easiest category if you have one.
  • Large groups, with fuzzy edges: this has practical advantages but must be defined.
  • Small closed groups: working with these is challenging but possible.
  • “Endangered species”: this is where we run the greatest danger of “keeping a name in a pedigree” without any associated biological reality; small fragments are meaningful only if maintained in some relevant larger context.

Large closed groups: These are easy to define once we decide how large is “large”? Bottlenecks are relative, the more numbers we work with the better our chance of keeping a major proportion of the genetic variation we’re trying to save. We can describe a general picture here, and the other situations can be treated as they vary from it. This is where we need to introduce some population genetics concepts:

“Gene frequency”: a thing, a number, which tells us something about a breeding group; don’t worry about how to develop the actual number. All traits are based on genes, and all genes exist at some frequency–it’s just harder to measure the interesting ones so we sometimes use “markers.”

“Effective population size”: another informative number, which takes into account the relative breeding contributions of males and females. An effective population of 10 can retain genes existing at frequency of 0.1 or higher; uncommon (below 0.1) and rare (below 0.05) variants will likely be lost. For our purposes, in a typical horse-breeding situation, “effective size 10” means some number much larger than 10. Note: it does not matter whether the population expands in numbers; expansion helps to keep in circulation the genes that you do have, but it does not do anything about ones that were lost when the founders were selected.

“The sire is half the herd”–we all know that maxim. In a preservation breeding context the point is precisely that we don’t want any one sire to dominate any program to the extent of half its genes. The more one narrows down the sire selection, the more, and the more diverse, mares must be kept in order to retain the original genetic variation. The most efficient way to maintain diversity is to use multiple sires on several small sets of mares, and rotate the sires. The idea, always of course influenced by real-world considerations, among them the phenotypic suitability of a particular combination, is to equalize breeding opportunity in order to maximize the proportion of genes retained.

Inbreeding and selection pressure are considerations in any breeding situation–they are not specialized aspects of the preservationist approach. Inbreeding, like random mating, simplifies the math, so is overly important in population genetics theory. Inbreeding can be a useful tool, and incidentally is a fact in any closed breeding group–inbreeding operates at the level of breeds, so long as they have closed stud books, not just within limited subsets of breeds. Inbreeding drives genes to fixation and can lead to the loss of alleles from the population, so one goal of presevationist planning should be to minimize the average degree of inbreeding. Inbreeding is not an end in itself.

Once we have a preservation group defined (say for now all the horses, or at least a representative sample, are in preservationist hands, though that is not a trivial assumption) and reproducing, the best way to retain maximum genetic diversity is to spread the horses among more than one program, and let subgroups happen. In theory we want a set of “cooperator breeders” working toward a shared vision. That calls to mind another non-trivial problem: preservation breeders as people will, by definition, be eccentric and… let’s say independent minded. Those independent visions are essential, each maintaining its own distinct sample of the horses in question; there still must be enough of the shared vision, and some sort of working definition, to retain the genetic identity of the preserved group.

Part II (CMK Record, XI/3 Fall, 1995)

(Continued from last issue — the “to be continued” text block was lost in production. Last time we outlined the basic notions of population genetics, in terms of preservation breeding with a large closed population. Further implications arise when other kinds of genetic entities are to be preserved.)

Large blurry groups will maximize the contribution from the founder animals. Generally, by the time any breeding group needs attention at the preservation level, the genetic influence of many founders will be lost among those descendants which qualify for inclusion in a closed group. Whether through attrition of numbers, or use in outcross programs, or most likely both, any set of “straight” pedigree horses carries only a fraction of the founders’ genes–compare, for example, the original Blunt or Davenport array, with the sample of those influences represented in modern straight Blunt or straight Davenport breeding.

Gene frequencies among the surviving descendants of anything reflect the action of mutation (negligible over human time scales), chance and selection. The gene frequencies of any modern closed group likely will be very different from the frequencies that would have been calculated among the founders. This effect is apt to be less exaggerated (simply because more of the founders are represented) if we define our modern population so that it descends “largely” (deliberately vague) from those founders. To follow up the previous example, there are Blunt and Davenport genes in modern CMK Arabians which have been lost from their straight Blunt or Davenport relatives.

Philosophically and historically the breeding group with blurry outlines is different from more traditional approaches but it is squarely based on an accurate biological view: species are naturally distinct biological entities with more or less firm barriers against crossing; breeds are artificially maintained subsets of a species. “Breed” is a historical (originally geographic) concept, and acquires biological reality only after the fact; this cannot be overstressed. “Breed” and “species” do not have equivalent implications, in terms of original or maintained genetic differences. In evolutionary terms, the genetic distance between pairs of species is measured by comparing their relative frequencies for marker genes–in making such measurements researchers do not expect to find complete non-overlap between related species. Obviously then this will not be expected between breeds, leave alone subsets of a breed.

Working with a blurry edged pedigree definition is not the same as maintaining a closed group, and not a substitute where the closed group still exists–the two approaches are complementary. In setting up a blurry group its organizers must neither claim that it is something else, nor allow it to be thought less than it is in its own right. There must be a working definition which sets off a biologically and phenotypically distinct entity from the breed at large.

Few (if any) absolute genetic differences exist between breeds. Still less can there be absolute differences between subsets of a breed, and there simply is no way to tell what caused such differences anyway–they are every bit as likely to have arisen through chance loss of genes from one set but not from the other, as they are to reflect an original difference. Given they were shown to represent an original difference, such still could represent accidents of sampling the original population (in our case the Bedouin horses, which ranged over a large area geographically and were more or less separated in terms of tribal origins).

Working with a blurry-edged definition gives tremendous possibilities in terms of developing subgroups: founder genes of different origin (in Arabian terms, different desert samples) will get together and produce new combinations not existing in the original animals. This may suit a particular breeder’s approach admirably, while it strikes another as highly undesirable. Neither response to this biological fact is “wrong,” but this does underline that one must be aware that gene combinations are not static, even in a closed group.

Preservation breeding of livestock is not like working with, say, historical rose varieties. Modern bushes of a rose bred in 1830 are biological clones of the same plant, with exactly the same gene combinations as the ancestor (barring rare mutations). Modern descendants of an individual Arabian horse which lived in 1830 need not actually carry any of its genes, and they certainly carry those genes in different combinations than did that ancestor. To give a simple coat color example from a more recent individual, Skowronek was homozygous for grey and heterozygous for the black and red pigment genes at extension locus. There are modern chestnut Arabians of intense Skowronek breeding–horses bred to maintain a high relationship to this ancestor have lost three (at least) of his detectable genes at these two easily defined loci.

Small closed groups make for the most difficult and challenging and certainly the most intellectually fascinating kind of project. We have already acknowledged that large groups will develop subgroups. Over time these may be selected or defined into their own distinct existence, so eventually the “small group” scenario becomes a concern in almost any preservation breeding context, regardless of your starting level. Keeping to our original examples, the Davenport program is developing an elaborate substructure, and within the English descended aspect of CMK there are a number of possible distinctions, including straight Blunt, Skowronek-Blunt, straight Crabbet, GSB-eligible, Crabbet-Old English, and CMK of high Crabbet percentage. Each of these may be maintained in its own distinctive form, while individuals of the more specialized groups may contribute genes to the more general ones.

The narrowly defined groups exist in their own right but they also serve as a resource of mental and conformation traits, soundness and performance ability, for use in other contexts. This is quite analogous to the position of preservation-bred stock relative to the breed at large. The drawback, at least in theory, to maintaining the maximum number of small sub-groups, is that inbreeding within each subgroup will increase more rapidly than it would if the entire set of horses had been crossed freely among themselves. The other side of the same coin is that crossing sub-groups will later provide a way to increase heterozygosity, and theoretically vigor and fertility, without going outside the original closed definition.

The notion to take home here is that maintaining population substructure is an efficient way to maintain genetic diversity; the modern Thoroughbred, with its history of international exchanges of sires and overall genetic homogenization, possesses far less genetic diversity than does the Arabian, with its history of breeding in national or smaller subgroups.

We all learned long ago that “inbreeding creates uniformity.” If you take nothing else away from this discussion, at least cross that off your list of life’s basic concepts. Inbreeding drives genes to homozygosity and thereby shows up underlying genetic variance. Inbreeding actually creates phenotypic variability. Selection among the results of inbreeding may give rise to uniformity. Is this what you want?

A program cannot possibly maintain the full range of genetic diversity, and is not likely to maintain representative frequencies, of any founder population, through a bottleneck of two or three or five individuals. “Rare” genes are defined to exist below 0.05 frequency–nothing in a group of five horses (among them possessing a theoretical maximum total of 10 genes at any locus, and in practice there will be fewer) can exist below 0.10. If a “rare” gene from the original population, of which these five horses are a sample, is by chance present, it automatically has gone above its original frequency; if it’s not in there it never can come back, so long as the group is bred closed. This effect is not automatically either good or bad, but is simply what happens, and it illustrates that “preservation” operates at different levels. Clearly one can only “preserve” what is still in the world to be worked with, but just as clearly, the more extensive the sample with which one starts breeding now, the more correctly the desired population will be reflected in future generations.

A program cannot achieve flat phenotypic “uniformity” without losing genes; selection for a totally uniform true-breeding group is in fact the opposite of genetic preservation (besides being a highly theoretical construct–biological reality is quite different). A program, or a group of cooperator programs, can maintain or reproduce something closer to the original population by crossing derived lines back together. Sublines will automatically develop when more than one breeder is directing the course of selection, and so far from being disadvantageous, these can be highly useful from many viewpoints. (I am deliberately running this idea into the ground–it is one of the most important things of which preservation breeders must be aware.)

Endangered Species: At this level (“threads and fragments” in our tapestry analogy) a real genetic presence can readily be reduced to “a name in a pedigree” unless the line is maintained in some appropriate biological context. When a breed is evolving rapidly, saving descendants of an uncommon element means nothing, unless the breeder interested in preserving that element is working with some semblance of the breeding background to which it belongs historically and genetically. This point is missed by many people who breed horses–perhaps especially Arabian horses–who boast they have a line to Mare X or Great Sire Y but haven’t noticed (or alternatively may be quite proud of) how often the descendant bears little resemblance to the ancestor. No one would try to deny that such resemblances can persist across a breed–but the point of preservation is precisely that more such resemblances may be more predictably maintained if breeders don’t depend simply on chance to bring them forward. Chance will tend to swamp the real genetic influence of rare lines, by simple force of numbers, outside the preservation context. [See Ann T. Bowling’s “Questioning breeding myths in light of genetics“]

Sire lines tend to be the most rapidly evolving aspect of any breed of any species, except where a closed stud book has been essentially taken over by a line or two and there’s no more room for change. The Y chromosome is a biological entity and is only handed on from sire to son. It is possible to measure genetic distance by sequencing yDNA. Probably more important for our discussion, old and traditional sire lines are more likely to be maintained in old and traditional breeding contexts; the persistence of a no longer fashionable sire line is an obvious marker for the program directed by a breeder who appreciates the traditional stock. Emphasis on sire lines works both ways then–it definitely helps us to find genes of diminishing frequency, and it theoretically carries them physically (but remember few genes on the Y are known, except those directly relating to male fertility). [NB: to date (2007), while Y chromosome variation is easily found in most species tested, none has been detected in the horse.]

Dam lines tend to be biologically conservative. Rare and uncommon genes tend to be carried through the bottom of the pedigree–simply because so many more mares than stallions breed actively in each generation. By simple chance, more carriers of any uncommon gene will be used on the female side than on the male. Occasionally a mare will hand a rare gene on to one or more influential stallion sons and a breed experiences a major change in gene frequency. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is associated with the cytoplasm, not the cell nucleus, and thus transmitted almost entirely through the egg, essentially only through the female line. Very little mtDNA is carried by sperm (though such transmission has proven detectable in carefully designed mouse experiments). [See M. Bowling’s 1998 article “What’s in a Name“] [NB: it has been shown since this writing that sperm transmission of mtDNA does not occur under normal conditions.]

mtDNA carries important genes which interact with nuclear genes; also, like yDNA [which has not proven to be informative in the horse], it can be a tracer for historical and biological change and the interrelationships of lines. Generally populations have more dam than sire lines so mtDNA theoretically is more useful than yDNA; it has also proven more variable in practice. This area is only beginning to be investigated in the horse but it carries exciting potential.

“Middle of the pedigree” elements may readily be overlooked. Historically breeders have thought in terms of sire (west) or dam (east) lines–we often study published charts of sire and dam lines as a shorthand way of handling pedigrees. Sire and dam lines in fact reflect the smallest portion of any pedigree, and certainly of gene transmission–only the Y chromosome and cytoplasmic mtDNA respectively are guaranteed to run along the top or bottom of a pedigree. Except in terms of those two elements, and thus for the vast majority of genetic material, position in the pedigree has nothing to do with potential genetic influence; important horses, still visibly influential, may not have left direct sire or dam lines. Davenport’s *Haleb and the Blunt’s Bint Nura GSB come readily to mind as examples.

This opens an enormous area for discussion or consideration, and space forbids addressing it in more than this very elementary fashion. The underlying reality is that any ancestor in any pedigree may have contributed genes to any modern descendant–but at the same time any ancestor’s genes, once we get back a few generations, may have been lost completely. There is no way to tell by looking at the list of names which is a pedigree, the ancestors that actually are genetically important in the horse to which that list belongs. We must look at the horses and learn as much as possible about the ancestors, in order to make rational judgments on this point.

Mid-pedigree names may become important in developing subgroups. Simply as a fact–with neither negative nor positive associations–breeders may use any name as a marker to define a group (and it may be used by its presence or absence). The bigger and more influential the “name,” in fact, the more useful it may be, in terms of future genetic balance, to reserve some lines for crossing back to it–within the large group however defined.

What are we trying to preserve? Genetic diversity buffers the breed against change; genetic diversity interacts with environment to provide the basis for all variation within a breed. Preservationist breeders have one underlying goal: to promote the maintenance of genetic diversity. It should not be necessary to state that the preservationist approach grows out of having observed negative changes in the breed. We are preserving the genes which influence major traits, including disposition, soundness and endurance, which are not necessarily addressed in the show ring.

Different preservationist groups have more in common than they do dividing them; it is to all our benefits to make common cause for a generally different approach to breeding the Arabian horse. A listing of preservationist group contacts would be a very useful practical tool in advancing this goal, and the members of the Arabian Horse Historians Association, assembled at their 1994 Annual Meeting, agreed that serving as the clearing house for such information was a valid role for AHHA. Preservation breeders may themselves become an endangered species–no one has any choice without a vigorous preservationist movement.

from: “For the Record” CMK Record, XI/3: page 10/12 Fall, 1995

(GMB–We’ve edited Deborah’s letter because as we understand her point it’s not so much to comment on other preservationist activities, as to caution CMK breeders about mistakes they might be in danger of making. Of course we suspect, too, Deborah would agree if we pointed out that there are many registered Arabians which are not preservationist-bred in any sense, but which also “should not be bred on” for their lacks with regard to conformation, soundness, disposition or breed character. Overall we certainly second her warning and are glad to see such thinking in the CMK ranks: this movement absolutely would lose its identity, its purpose and its point if it did not continue to turn out the beautiful, traditional using Arabian that brought all of us into the CMK circle. Fortunately it is clear that CMK pedigrees continue to produce just that kind of Arabian. We have thought about this quite a lot, over the years, and it strikes us that CMK breeders in particular are not so much in danger of full-blown “preservationist syndrome” as may be the followers of some other lines of breeding. It is easy to be caught up in enthusiasm over the rarity of a particular individual, and obviously we all have our own preferences for some style of horse as opposed to another. That said, very few of us began in CMK Arabians with the idea first and looked for the horses later; a more typical CMK story is learning to appreciate a particular kind of Arabian–we would say practically always starting from a using, riding horse orientation–and then finding that “our kind of horse” belongs with the CMK Heritage. Other major advantages to CMK as a preservation scheme are its avoiding a closed definition and the great genetic diversity it maintains. Large-sense CMK breeders have much more room to operate than do the people working with other narrow closed preservation groups; specialized narrower groups within CMK may be crossed with other CMK lines without losing their CMK identity.

As the CMK preservation movement explores more kinds of promotional efforts, we can expect to hear from more people who actually do set out to see what these CMK horses are about, with no preconceived idea of what kind of horse they’re going to find. That is precisely why we need to go cautiously on the promotion front: we must be sure we are attracting people who can understand and appreciate this kind of horse, rather than those who may latch on to the name yet expect to modify the horses to suit some other set of criteria.

Deborah may not have had this next point in mind but many horse activities pursued these days do not place very high priority on the well-being of the horse, whether physical or psychological [the two are very closely intertwined]. [See Rick Synowski’s article “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder In Arabian Horses“.] No thinking breeder would care to see any horse exposed to such dangers, but we are convinced the CMK Arabian in particular is ill served by certain aspects of modern training and presentation [and statements by show trainers bear this out]. The CMK Heritage will place more emphasis in future on the actual physical “preservation” of individual horses in this day-to-day safety sense. This must include, almost by definition, the encouragement of alternative systems of use and presentation which do maintain horsemanlike values and do emphasize the well-being of the animal.

We find, too, we can’t close without attempting to give a slightly different slant on “preservationist syndrome.” The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy distinguishes conservation–the simple maintenance of a stock in existence, without changing it–from improvement, breeding with selection toward any set of visual and functional standards. ALBC advises conservation of very primitive breeding groups, whose raison d’etre is to serve as a reservoir of basic genes for health and soundness which may be at risk for loss in high-performance domestic lines. By contrast selection for continued improvement is accounted appropriate in traditional “improved” stocks whose history includes a performance standard.

The using Arabians of the Reese and Dean circles, whose breeders provided the background for the CMK movement, certainly were highly selected. So were those of the Crabbet Stud. The breeders of the CMK Heritage can call on the genetic strength resulting from that selection; at the same time we have, as Deborah pointed out, a grave responsibility to maintain the standards which were achieved by those past breeders. The problem in modern Arabian horse circles, of course, is to recognize “improvement” when one sees it. There certainly are Arabian breeders who see any change that has come about since the horses left the Bedouin tribes as change for the worse, and who think in ALBC’s conservationist terms, of maintaining a comparatively primitive stock as little different as may be from the desert war mare. There are many more of us who are not impressed with the way the show horses have changed in this country over the past two decades [the wink of an eye compared to the breed’s history in the west, leave alone its prior existence]. There is a place for all of us, but it is essential that we understand the implications of our positions.

Do remember that many of the preservationist programs are operating with minuscule numbers of horses — all recognizable activity with an identity other than “mixed source show horse” amounts to little more than 10% of the breed combined. We address this not in terms of what level of selection a given program may have room to impose, if they are to breed any horses at all; but of the simple fact that their horses have relatively little impact on the 400,000+ living Arabians in North America. They cannot change the breed’s nature, and if such horses fill a place in their owners’ lives, that is really all that need be asked of them. There is nothing wrong with conservation breeding, in the ALBC sense, so long as one recognizes one is doing it, and does not make impossible claims for the results.

It’s a completely separate subject, of course, but we have never been comfortable with those overarching schemes one occasionally sees put forward, whereby some party or official entity is meant to “certify” breeding stock–not because we approve of breeding from poor horses, but because we cannot picture how any breed-wide selection scheme could be at once effective, in the sense of doing anything in particular, and sufficiently inclusive to recognize all the range of variation which the breed includes and which must be maintained for future reference.

As to the other-bashing of “preservationist syndrome,” we do consider it basic to be civil to one’s neighbors. In fact we always think it’s a pity when anyone with a preservationist slant doesn’t recognize that we are each other’s natural allies.)

[For more thoughts on this subject, see M.Bowling’s 1997 article “Preservation and Improvement.”]

See also:

CID: The Paradigm has Shifted

CID: The Paradigm Has Shifted

COPYRIGHT 1997 By MICHAEL BOWLING

from Arabian Visions magazine Sept/Oct 1997

used by permission of Michael Bowling

Author’s note: This piece illustrates the vitality of a new communications medium, for it grew primarily out of Internet discussions of the subject. Special thanks to Mary Anne Grimmell who planted the seed of “putting into laymen’s language” the potential uses and misuses of the new CID test, along with the positive impact it will have on breeding farms, large and small, and who assisted in reviewing the story in draft.

Everything you know about CID has to be re-examined in the light of a single new fact. It is now possible to know where the CID gene is. This changes the shape of our world. No CID foals ever need be produced again.

CID: PROGENY TESTING

Remember that progeny testing was previously the only way to know whether an Arabian horse had the CID gene. One could wait, and hope the gene did not turn up by accident; or one could make a systematic effort, and breed a stallion to known carrier mares, as one prominent breeder did with an imported horse a few years ago. (I am not aware that any other stallion was formally progeny tested, though there may have been one or two that I missed. Obviously if any horse had been so tested, and turned up negative, it would have been trumpeted from the housetops. Even at the highest estimates of CID gene frequency, most horses are expected to be negative; this implies that few were tested.)

To achieve 95% confidence of knowing an individual Arabian did not have the gene, one would have to see a) 11 healthy offspring from known carrier mates; or b) healthy inbred offspring from 22 of the tested animals’s own offspring. That awkward gender-free sentence is the only one I am going to have to write, since obviously no mare could ever be rigorously progeny tested to be CID-free, and also have a breeding career as such. Most Arabian stallions would end up siring more offspring in their progeny testing phase than they did in their breeding careers. (Note that breeding a prospective sire to 22 of his own daughters would have the advantage, over the 11 offspring from carrier mares, of potentially turning up any lethal or seriously deleterious gene(s), not just CID. Note also that it is 11 offspring from known carriers–which could include several offspring from any one carrier–but it is offspring from 22 different daughters.) That testing, to that level of confidence, has been prohibitively expensive — this is plain from the fact that essentially no one did it. And it would generate a whole crowd of young horses that needed to be somewhere, after the testing was done, whether the results were positive or negative.

CID can be openly discussed, because acknowledging one individual has the gene will no longer cast a pall over a whole breeding program or line of breeding. Individual horses can be tested and their individual status can be known; matings can be planned accordingly; guilt by association, and the notion of contagious genes, can finally be laid to rest. The rumor mill will have to find something else to grind. Statements of the form “Our neighbor’s daughter’s boyfriend’s cousin knew someone who bred a mare to that horse and had a CID foal” will no longer carry any weight (not that they should ever have done, but the climate of ideas will change, and the impossibility of proving a negative will no longer apply). The delusion that CID is the only lethal gene of concern in Arabian breeding can be put out of its misery as well, and the substantive discussion of other problems, and the search for other gene tests, can begin — inspired by the success with this difficult and challenging problem. The paradigm has shifted. New ways of thinking will be required.

A. What are the drawbacks to CID (or any lethal defect) without a gene test? I submit, the following:

  1. Foals die.
  2. Breeders suffer major emotional and financial hardship.
  3. Potential newcomers are put off becoming involved with the breed: at best they cannot be sure their new horses are not carriers, and they are at some risk of having known, but unadmitted, carriers foisted off on them.

B. What becomes of those drawbacks, given a carrier test? They all go away:

  1. No foals need die, because no one need unknowingly cross together two horses with the gene.
  2. Breeders can test their stock and know how to avoid the problem.
  3. Potential buyers can test their prospects and know where they stand. The paradigm shifts, and new ways of thinking are required.

For the frequency of a gene in a breed to be reduced, it is not necessary to remove from breeding all individuals possessing it. Such animals need only sire or produce fewer offspring than they would have done under random mating (if their status had not been known, in other words). That is almost certainly what will happen once this gene test is in widespread operation, and the gene’s frequency in the breed will gradually decrease. The benefits of the test therefore can be obtained without gelding all gene-positive colts, or denying registration to all gene-positives, or any other such scheme; therefore to do so would be an injustice. It would be applying the test to punish “a moral flaw,” rather than as a tool to manage “a gene” for the benefit of the breed. Genes do not have moral or ethical content; questions of right and wrong arise in the way humans deal with their knowledge.

Every individual of every species carries genetic defects, and CID is not the only lethal operating in the Arabian breed. Acknowledging the existence of a problem, and developing a rational means to deal with it, is the opposite of denying that it is a serious one. All the drawbacks of CID arose out of the fact that we could not tell where the gene was. Now we can. Vicki Hearne’s Adam’s Task, a book of long essays on animal training, describes human-animal interaction as a form of language. One of Hearne’s recurring themes is “the stories we know” about animals, or about the ways humans interact with animals, or the way animals interact with humans (she refers to animals as “knowing stories” too). Her position is that we can operate only in terms of the stories we tell ourselves, because that is the practical form our knowledge takes.

CID: COMBINED IMMUNODEFIENCY

The genetic immuno-deficiencies are a complex set of conditions; since the early 1950s close to 20 different syndromes have been reported in humans and examples have been recorded in a few other species. The first indications of what came to be recognized as severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) of Arabian foals were clinical reports out of Australia in the 1960s, and the syndrome was described in the U.S. in 1973. Its inheritance as a simple autosomal recessive was established by 1977. The disease can be tentatively diagnosed from a blood sample of a young foal. A white blood cell (lymphocyte) count of less than 1000 per mm3 (vs 2500-3000 for a healthy foal) and lack of IgM (immunoglobulin M) are presumptive evidence of SCID; confirmation is by post-mortem showing underdeveloped thymus and lymph nodes. Lacking immune capacity, such foals will succumb before 5 months of age of massive infections.

With the SCID gene test:

  • Sick Arabian foals of untested parents can be tested for the presence of the SCID gene in double dose, which will provide rapid and definite distinction between foals which are candidates for major supportive efforts and those which are not.
  • Mare owners considering outside stallions for prospective matings can ask to see evidence of SCID gene status, and make informed breeding decisions.
  • Within a breeding program, excellent individuals which happen to possess the SCID gene may be bred so as to retain their good qualities and yet avoid producing affected foals, and gradually reduce the gene’s frequency.
  • It should be emphasized that SCID is a recessive genetic defect; no evidence has ever been found for any defect or weakness in heterozygous animals.

This notion has wide applications. For many years Arabian breeders told themselves the story that the Arabian, as “the oldest and purest breed of horse,” must by that nature be free of lethal defects. Many of them even extended this story to say that, if a lethal gene ever appeared, it must be the result of a pedigree flaw (not in the sense of introducing a gene from outside, but of somehow “causing” defects by violating the breed’s metaphysical purity). I recently commented to someone that Arabian horses have been held to be immune to the laws of biology; their genetic problems are viewed as the effects of past moral transgressions (this is a prominent theme in 19th century nature philosophy, and in early 20th century racism). The story of population genetics now tells us that lethal genes, like other genes, are part of a breed’s and a species’s history. Every individual of every species is now held to carry some lethal or highly deleterious gene(s) in hidden form. The longer a species has been under domestication, with matings controlled by humans and limited by studbook breed definitions, the more such genes will have a chance to arrive at substantial frequencies, and therefore to become unhidden through homozygous expression. In other words, the story that many Arabian breeders tell themselves, which amounts to saying that CID was a temporary aberration and if we can only get rid of that gene we will be “safe” again, is mis- (or dis-) information. There are candidate lethals described in the genetics or veterinary literature, some of which are better established than others (in terms of mode of inheritance, or the simple fact of being inherited; some are at present merely suspicious, since they appear to be recurring and breed-specific.).

The success of the CID story is that the gene now can become unhidden without killing foals. Our constructive response now is not to obsess over CID, which has been made harmless. It is to look for modes of inheritance, and for gene tests, which will put the other problems in the same position. People have been breeding blind with regard to CID for decades (its recessive nature has been known for over 20 years, never mind how long it existed before being defined). Now that situation has changed. With a gene test, CID is going to become a matter of fact. It will not be a whispers-behind-the-hand subject as it has been for so long. Some discussions of this topic seem to assume that the way things are (attitudes and assumptions, the stories we tell ourselves) are going to remain the way they are right now, forever. They will not. The paradigm has shifted. New ways of thinking are not only required, they are inevitable.

Selected References:

McGuire, T.C. and M.J. Poppie. 1973. Hypogammaglobulinemia and thymic hypoplasia in horses: A primary combined immunodeficiency disorder. Infection and Immunity 8: 272-277.

Poppie, M.J. and T.C. McGuire. 1977. Combined Immunodeficiency in foals of Arabian breeding: evaluation of mode of inheritance and estimation of prevalence of affected foals and carrier mares and stallions. J. Amer. Vet. Med. Assoc. 170: 31-33.

Shin, E.K., L.E. Perryman and K. Meek. 1997. A Kinase-Negative Mutation of DNA-PK (subscript CS) in Equine SCID Results in Defective Coding and Signal Joint Formation. J. Immunol. 158 (8): 3565-3569.

Studdert, M.J. 1978. Primary, Severe, Combined Immunodeficiency Disease of Arabian Foals. Austr. Vet. J. 54: 411-417.

Wiler, R., R. Leber, B.B. Moore, L.F. Van Dyk, L.E.Perryman and K. Meek. 1995. Equine severe combined immunodeficiency: A defect in V(D)J recombination and DNA-dependant protein kinase activity. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. US 92: 11485-11489.

The Arab Horse in Legend and History

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Amin Zaher

by Dr. Amin Zaher
Photos from the Zaher collection (Western Horseman Mar/Apr’48)

Nigma at 5 yrs. with her first colt in Egypt. Picture taken in front of Prince Mohammed Ali’s palace.

Amir Abdelkader Algazairy, a nineteenth century Morroccan nobleman, tells us that some Arabs of the Azed tribe went to Jerusalem to congratulate Solomon on his marriage to the Queen of Sheba. Having completed their mission, they asked him to give them food to take on their long journey. He gave them a stallion descended from the Ismail stock and said to them:

When you are hungry, place your best rider on this horse and arm him with a stout lance; by the time you have collected your wood and kindled a flame you will see him returning with the fruit of a successful chase.”

The Azed did this and never failed to obtain a gazelle or an ostrich. Therefore they called this horse “Zad Elrakeb,” meaning “provision for the rider.” Unfortunately Amir Abdelkader did not give any description of the stallion. Later when bred he produced some mighty sons and daughters.

The first Egyptian records of the horse are very ancient. A wall painting shows an Egyptian hunter, and it was drawn about 1400 B.C. The horse has a good many of the original, desirable characteristics of the Arabian such as the dished face, the large eye, the sensitive muzzle, the long swan neck, the well rounded rump, and the cocked tail, all of which are still highly esteemed in the Arabian horse. Whether this kind of horse existed in Egypt at that time, or whether the horse originated in the mind of the artist, nobody can tell, but the latter seems improbable.

Before the rise of Mohammedanism the famous Arabian poets, Imro-olkais, Amr Ibn Abi Rabeah, and Antara wrote their masterpieces of Arabic verse. In these they described many of the characteristics, colors, and habits of the Arabian horse. From their description one can tell that they were talking of the horse of the desert.

Shahloul by Ibn Rabdan, Royal Agriculture Society stallion, Egypt.

The Bedouins of Arabia had the Arabian horse, loved it, and in their life it played an extremely important role. The sayings of the prophet Mohammed reveal the significance of the Arabian to them. The following are good examples:

1. Bounty and happiness are ever on horseback; horses are gold that one may hold.

2. Every Moslem must have as many horses as he can afford.

3. The best of all is the bay, chestnut, or black with star and three stockings.

4. Abu Horairah recalled the prophet saying: “when a man races his mare with another horse unknown to him and the winner is a matter of chance, it is not gambling; but if he knows his mare will win, that is gambling.”

Gambling was forbidden. The prophet took gambling to be a form of cheating, such as betting on a sure thing.

5. The prophet said that nothing made a man happier than the following: (a) playing with his wife, (b) training his mare, (c) hunting with his bow and arrow.

6. When Arabian horses gather and run together, the chestnut will be the leader.

7. The best is the attentive, black, five-year-old; the next best is the five-year-old with three stockings and no white on the off forefoot. If it is not black, dark brown will do.

8. Every man who loves a horse is as good a man as he who is generous to the poor.

Nigma at 32 yrs. Much of the produce of this mare came to America.

The Arabian horse has been a source of pleasure to men not only during the time of the prophet but at all other times. Al Asmai, the great Arabian poet who lived about 750 A.D., tells how Haroun al Rasheed rode out to see a race. He says,

I was among those who came with the Califf Al Rasheed. The horses all belonged to Haroun Al Rasheed, his sons, and Soliman Ibn Gafar El Mansoor. A black mare named Zibd, which had been bred by Haroun Al Rasheed, won the race. The Califf was so delighted that he sent for me. He told me to write a poem about this mare Zibd, describing her from head to foot.”

The Bedouins certainly must have been masters in the science of breeding. In the development of their famous Arabian they used many modern breeding techniques. When they breed they never forgot the importance of color, endurance, thirst and hunger.

One trick they used was to measure their horses with a string, passing it just behind the animal’s ears and joining the two ends at the upper lip. The measurement thus gained served as a guide for the proper distance from hoof to withers. H. H. Mohammed Ali says “Find a well bred Arabian horse and it will surprise you to see what a true test this is.”

Color preference was, and still is, good material for argument among Arabian horse breeders, as it is with most other horsemen. Even the Arabs had a diversity of opinion with regard to color. In general they preferred the black first, then the dark bay with a star on the forehead, and then the dark chestnut. Dark colors were always favorites. The light chestnut and grey were last on the list.

Very light colors, such as palominos, were not popular. In fact, they used to call such a light colored animal “Ghagari,” which means “gypsy.” There was no reason for their disliking light colored horses; I believe it was just a matter of individual taste. Among the thousands of real Arabians that I have known and seen I have yet to find a single one that resembled the American Palomino. It is recorded, however, that such a color did exist among the Arabs, although it was very rare.

The Arabs were very superstitious about markings. White well up on the legs was considered unlucky. Two white socks on diagonal or lateral feet were also disliked. If the two fore or two hind feet were white, however, the horse was acceptable.

Modern scientific breeders question the belief that strains and families exist among the Arabian horses. An interesting story, however, is offered by Amir Abdelkader about the early foundation of the Arab.

At the beginning of the Christian era, about two thousand years ago, the Arem flood covered the Arabian lands, as is mentioned in the Koran, the holy book of Islam. All horses were turned loose for some little time and it became difficult to recapture them. After the flood subsided, five Bedouins were hunting in the desert. Here they saw five mares by a well. After several days they succeeded in capturing them. On their way back home they were unable to find anything to eat so they at last decided to kill one of the captured mares. Which one became a matter of heated discussion. It was finally decided to race them, the loser to be killed. This indicates that they had in mind the principle of selection. While the race was in progress, they killed a deer so that it was not necessary to kill one of the mares. These five mares were destined to become the ancestors of a new line of horses. They named one Saqlawieh, because she had glossy hair; another Om Arkoob, because she had a defective hock. Arkoob is the Arabian word for hock. Another they called Showaima, because she had many cow-licks; another Ibayyah, because the dress of her rider slipped down and she carried it all the way back on her tail; and lastly Kahilah, because she had dark eyes.

According to another story, which is believed by many authorities, the mares were originally named after their owners. When a man tied a mare in his stable, this was a sign that he owned it and the horse took his name. If the mare foaled, her offspring might be sold to another breeder, and then its name would be composed of two names, its dam’s name and the name of her dam’s owner, and so on.

The name, “Seglawi Jedran Ibn Sudan,” is found on some Arabian pedigrees. According to the above theory the female ancestors on the dam’s side were owned by three different men, Seglawi, Jedran, and Ibn Sudan. In a similar way, as time goes on, you may have separate families in this country. It has happened in every kind of livestock. Dickinson, Draper, Selby, Babson, Ben Hur, all may develop strains if they continue to breed Arabians, especially if they do not make many outcrosses. Then their names may have a meaning similar to Seglawi, Koheilan, Dahman, and so on.

The ability some claim to separate Arabians into certain types according to conformation, to relate those types to certain strains, and to know their family from their conformation is incredible to me. There is only one type that should be in the mind of Arabian horse breeders, “the typical Arabian,” even though individuals may vary.

An Introduction to the Author, Dr. Amin Zaher

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Amin Zaher

From “This Issue and Next” (Western Horseman Mar/Apr’48)

Dr. Amin Zaher, D.V.M., M.S., has recently come to the United States from Egypt to obtain a PhD. in genetics and animal breeding. His thesis title is “The Genetic History of the Arab in America.” Prior to his arrival in the states he occupied the position of Arabian horse breeder in the stud of the Royal Agricultural Society of Egypt for twelve years. The Egyptian ministry of agriculture has requested that he visit the various Arabian Stud farms while he is in America. Already he has visited many of the most prominent, such as Kellog, (sic) Dickinson, Babson, Van Vleet, Raswan, Tormohlen, Draper, Bazy Miller and many others. Just so that he would have plenty to occupy his time he has been judging Arabian horse shows and has kindly consented to write three articles for The Western Horseman. The first, which appears in this issue, is on the background. This will be followed by articles on the Arab in Egypt and America today.

My Visit with the American Arabs (Horses)

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Amin Zaher

by Dr. Amin Zaher Photos from the Zaher collection (Western Horseman Jul/Aug ’48)

The Van Vleet Arabs on their high altitude ranch, not far from Denver, Colorado.

While I was in Egypt, I read much about the American-bred Arabs. When I had the opportunity to come to this country to study, it was my honor to be asked by the Egyptian government to make a tour and to inspect these Arabians in America.

After making some preliminary inquiries, I learned that a great many of these Arabs were in California, so I planned to begin with the Western breeders. I wrote to them before leaving Lansing by train and reached San Francisco after about three days.

On a foggy day, I started out to see my first lot of American Arabs on the Jedel ranch of J. E. Draper. No, I was not dreaming; Arabs were before my eyes in the pasture. More than ten thousand miles from Egypt, and I was awakened by the smell of Arabs, after having missed them for months.

While in San Francisco I met another Arab breeder, a young man, “not rich enough to have Arabs,” as he said; yet right in the heart of San Francisco he had a few. He is not a rancher, but he likes Arabs. In the hotel we talked about them, and I was surprised at the excellent information he was able to give me about the Arabs of America. His wife was also very interested in them.

The next morning I saw his horses. I said, “Mr. Smith, which are your first purchases and which the last?” When he showed me it indicated what happens to almost all Arabian lovers in this country. Their first purchases are not the best type, and the last bought more closely resemble the ideal type. This is a good sign.

The day next took the train down the Pacific coast to Santa Barbara, to the home of “The Dean.” I call General J. M. Dickinson the dean of Arab breeders in this country because I knew even while I was still in Egypt, that he had spent most of his life taking care of Arabs. He has imported horses from almost every country to his large stud. The General is a man who has written about them in a fair and authoritative manner. I spent an enjoyable day at his ranch.

I then proceeded to Los Angeles to attend the meeting of the Arabian Breeders Association of California to which I had been invited. There I was suddenly asked to speak. Although it was the first time I had given a public address in a foreign language before a large group of people, I enjoyed a very pleasant evening. In Los Angeles I also saw the Kellogg Institute, and, under the guidance of Mrs. Phillips, the secretary of the society, I had the opportunity to inspect many fine Arabs and to talk to breeders about their horses.

Sartez and Dr. Zaher at the Raswan Ranch at Cedar Crest, New Mexico.


Cedar Crest, N.M., was my next stop, to see the enthusiastic Carl Raswan and his Maniquiat. He is happy on his 8000-foot mountain among his few, well-selected Arabs, and his many books. It was most pleasant to sit on Arabian carpets and “talk horse” until three o’clock in the morning!

Although I had been looking at horses for thirty days, when I returned to Lansing I was soon “horse sick” and started out to see more.

In Peru, Ill., a young lady, Mrs. Bazy Miller, has established her Arab stud. Mrs. Miller was busy with her horses when I saw her. That night we talked horses, and, although her husband pretended to know nothing about them, he joined the talk, and expressed ideas that many horsemen would do well to learn and follow.

My most thrilling visit was to Van Vleet in Colorado where Arabs are kept at a very high altitudes. Mr. Wayne was kind enough to tell me how the Arabs are trained here and how they react to the climate. I shall never forget the horror of going up the winding road through the mountains, where one can see the great city of Denver, so small, moving with every turn. This was my first acquaintance with high mountains.

Azkar. Ben Hur Farm, Portland, Indiana.


A drive to Portland, Ind., gave me the pleasure of meeting Mr. and Mrs. Tormohlen of the Ben Hur farm and seeing their horses. On their farm they live with their Arabs, feeding them, talking to them, and writing about their ancestors. I was impressed by their broad knowledge of the Arab.

My last trip before writing this was to see Arabs of my country, not in Egypt, but on the farm of Babson in Grand Detour, Illinois. They were the first Arabs I wanted to see when I came to America, but the last I got to visit. I saw them on a rainy, snowy day. What a difference between Egypt and America in almost everything — on weather, in pasture. But the horses have become quite adapted, as is the case with Arabs.

In September, 1947, I had the honor of being invited by the Arabian Breeders Association of California to judge their third annual show in Devonshire, Los Angeles. I drove to California with two of my Arab Lebanon friends who are very interested in Arabs. They were glad to see Arabs again after having missed them for so long. Through the generosity of Dr. and Mrs. Long of Tazana, I spent my happiest days in this country. The inspection of 250 pure-bred Arabs at the show, all in their best condition, was both thrilling and pleasant.

Shortly after my return to Lansing, I was invited to visit Mr. Kellogg in Battle Creek, Michigan. He was anxious to have me visit him, but so many people had told me that the old man could not stand long conferences that I expected to speak with him no more than five minutes. The greatest Arabian horse fancier in America, however, did almost all the talking about Arabs, and, to my surprise, for fifty-five minutes. The breakfast food king still maintains a great interest in the Arab horse.

In this my last article in this series, I want to try to answer some of the many questions I have been asked about American Arabs. Questions such as: What do you think of our Arabians, where do the best importations come from, and many other similar questions.

I know from experience that ideas about Arabs differ, and that looks, especially among horses, have a wide range. The importations to this country have also varied widely. There were several importations which were decidedly off-type. But what can the American breeder do when the importer says he is sending the best type of Arab? He has to take it for granted.

Importations were made from almost every country in the world that had Arabians — from Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Spain, France, Germany, England, South America, and other countries, average ones, and off-type animals. Every importer claimed his were best, no doubt.

The Arabian Horse Club of America had no classification requirement for registration, and it may have been logical not to make any requirements so that importations would not be discouraged.

In many instances I have been asked to judge horses, and for my opinion of horses that were off-type. They may have been pure Arabs, but certainly Arabs that good Arabian breeders do not like. The owner, (not being thoroughly acquainted with the type) believed that he had the best, and spread the blood that he had to others who knew no more than himself. On the other hand there are cases where some breeders have typical horses, but neglect them. Occasionally some breeder who knows Arabs will get ahold of them and use them as the principal stallion in their stud. Some of those so secured have been twenty years old, and never used for breeding purposes before.

I was not well acquainted with the pedigree of the Arab of this country when I judged the Los Angeles show and heard the announcer say that Ramah and Skolma, (whom I had judged to be the champions of the show) were related. This indicates that importations do have something to do with the type of animals we see.

I then examined the pedigrees of most of the registered Arab horses in this country, paying greater attention to those I liked best and comparing them with the pedigrees of the animals I saw on my trip. It interested me very much to find out that the majority were closely related to Raseyn or Skowronek; some were related to such outstanding sires as Mirage, and a few other studs, who, I found out afterwards, are great favorites with the American breeders. Almost all stallions or mares that had the blood of the famous Ali Pasha Sherif of Egypt were also outstanding animals.

Some California breeders are making a mistake, I believe, in trying to increase the height and weight of the Arab. All of us know that the Arab is not a big horse. If you see a horse that is sixteen hands high, you should hesitate to classify him as an Arab. There may be Arabs which are comparatively tall, but they still maintain the majority of the typical Arab characteristics. If you have a sixteen- hand Arab which has a big head, drooping hind quarters, and long legs, would you like him? This kind of animal is surely an off-type and should not be used for breeding.

What do you want a big Arab for? Some people say for a Stock Horse. I know stock men. They have found from experience that tall, big horses tire easily, and smaller horses get the job done better. A Stock Horse does not need to be over 15 hands.

The Arab is still a foreigner in this country. Because he is a warm-blooded horse, I have heard that cowboys do not like him. Either he has been misrepresented to them, or their experience has been with a few exceptional horses. They have not tried him enough to know what abilities he has. The Arab has worked with stock since the dawn of history.

Which is the best Arab horse in America? This is always a very hard question to answer. It is a well-known fact that no animal on earth is perfect. At the same time, there are some better than others. To my mind, the best stallion for you is the one that adds desirable points to your mares.

Your stallion may have only one defect, but if the mares may have it too, you are going to fix this defect in all your animals for ages. I have seen this in some studs in America.

The United States is a big country and breeders do not usually have the opportunity to choose stallions that fit their individual mares. They cannot afford either to keep many stallions in one stud, or to send their mares a long way for a stallion in another state. This problem can be solved in one of two ways: either through exchange of stallions, or through averaging the defects of the mares and securing a stallion that can correct most of them. The smart choice of Gharris for Draper’s mares and Azkar for Ben Hur mares are examples. It is a sound principle to pay great attention to the pedigree (italics) and the progeny (end) of the stallion to be used.

Mares on the Kellogg Army Remount Station of Pomona, California.

When I tell the breeders these things, they still are not satisfied. They still want to know my opinion of the stallions I have seen. They want names. To answer this I can say: Gharris at Jedel, Ferseyn at Reese, Ramah at Scheele, Roayas at Phillips, one or two imported Polish Arabs at Pomona (Kellogg’s), Zarif [*Zarife] at Van Vleet, Sartez at Raswan, Azkar at Ben Hur, Fa-Eldin [Fay-el-Dine] at Babson, and Indraff at Bazy Miller. These are good stallions. Although each lacks a little that another may have, they are all good specimens of Arabs. Again I repeat, although they are good stallions, watch your step. Choose the stallion that can correct your mare’s defects.

I can see now that American breeders are the people who can and will gain new knowledge about the Arab. Very little scientific work has been done with the Arab. The American breeders, by keeping photographs, and filing full descriptions of their animals, can provide the colleges with rich material that can form the basis of future work on the Arab.

The horse of the desert is now running loose on your rich pastures in almost all your states. He will give you greater service than you expect, but do not go too far in trying for big animals. If you do you will not have Arabs, or service.

THE END.

Excerpted from: Gleanings from the Desert of Arabia: Chapter IV – Visit to the Sabaah

Articles of History:

excerpted from: GLEANINGS FROM THE DESERT OF ARABIA Chapter IV – Visit to the Sabaah Major R.D.Upton, 1881 from The Khamsat Volume Eleven Number Three Aug. ’94

 

            Towards the close of a long and trying day, we made repeated offers for a bay mare, five years old and unblemished; she was a beautiful creature, just under fifteen hands in height, very bloodlike, but wildly excitable, glared at us like a tigress, and resented our approach even. Crowds gathered round as we frequently repeated our offer. The Shaykh indicated she was not to be taken away, and we thought we were on the eve of obtaining her, but suddenly, among the sound of many voices and loud talking, the mare was taken off by her owner.

            This was just at sundown. I turned over in my mind what was best to be done, for I seemed to be losing time, which, under pressing circumstances, was of great consequence to me, and when dinner was announced, I ordered my tent to be struck, and preparations to be made for our departure that night.

            The Arabs who were about the Shaykh’s tent were much astonished at this movement. While we were quietly eating our dinner, Suleyman ibn Mershid, accompanied by Jadaan ibn Mahaid,c came in to us in haste, and after saluting us, and having been requested to sit and partake of our repast, asked, What meant the preparations they saw around them, and hwy were our tents struck? what had they done.? what had happened? I explained to Suleyman ibn Mirshid that I had come from a very great distance to visit him and his people; that he had expressed his willingness to receive us; that he said we could obtain some mares and horses from his people; but as I found, when I offered to buy, I could not obtain; I could not afford to delay longer, and although I regretted the object of my visit had failed as far as business was concerned, I was still glad to have seen him and his people. Both Suleyman ibn Mirshid and Jadaan ibn Mahaid begged and implored me to remain; they called upon our Effendi to intercede. I replied that I did not complain of the people not parting with their horses or mares if they did not want to part with them, but being told I could buy, and then to find no one would sell,w sa rather like being mocked. I had no desire to beat down his people; I was prepared to give and had offered a fair price; if he thought it was not sufficient, he could let me know.

            Suleyman ibn Mirshid and Jadaan ibn Mahaid, taking my hands in theirs, implored me to stay in a manner so demonstrative, in spite of my endeavors to restrain them, that I felt quite ashamed; and they promised faithfully that the next morning the bay mare should be mine.

            The next morning, things in and around the Sheykh’s tent appeared to us more quiet than usual. The usual scenes at the well near our tent had been performed. Notwithstanding we were anxiously expecting the mare, we kept a calm exterior; but although we looked about us as we strolled in the neighborhood, we could not see the mare, nor indeed any other. At last there was a slight stir in the tent of Suleyman ibn Mirshid; he came up to us, leading the mare, accompanied by Jadaan ibn Mahaid, and followed by the owner of the mare, who appeared rather dejected and reluctant to part with his mare. It was Sulyman ibn Mirshid who put the halter rope in my hands; her price was told out on the table, exactly that which I had offered, and handed over to her former owner, and the mare was picketed at our tent. A very simple certificate of the mare’s breeding and family was written out at my request, in the presence of the two Shaykhs, to which they placed their seals, one as a guarantee, the other as a witness.

            After this we were enabled to get on better, and eventually obtained both horses and manes. There were several for which I made offers. Generally, after an offer was made and we had some talk with the Shaykh on the subject, the animal was tied to his tent, the owner or owners an and many others resorted to the Shaykh’s tent, and after a long consultation, sometimes in tones loudly raised, the Shaykh appeared with the owner and his horse, or the animal was led away. The Badaween who looked on seemed to regard the proceedings with much interest. Talkat, the owner of a fine bay horse I selected, walked behind his horse, which was led by the Shaykh to our tent, looking as if he wee going to be hanged, and just as Suleyman bin Mirshid was handing me the halter, Talkat rushed forward to seize it; but the Shaykh turned upon him, rebuked him, and even threatened him with the end of the halter rope. These consultations sometimes lasted several hours. Another man brought up his mare with a colt at her foot, with a kind of savage determination on his face, as if he had made up his mind to a very disagreeable thing, after a long and apparently rather stormy debate in the Shaykh’s tent, in the presence of a large assembly, she became mine, but he led away the little foal in sullen silence. I could not get the little colt; but the mare was in foal, and dropped in the following spring a bay filly, own sister to the colt.

            Sometimes, when we thought we had almost concluded a bargain, at the last moment the owner could not make up his mind to part with his horse or mare, and disappeared suddenly; at other times, Arabs had to consult with their joint owners, and did not return. There were several animals we might have secured, but until I had obtained what I had specially gone for, I would not buy others. To be successful you must have the money with you, and be ready to pay it down, either in Turkish gold or silver, at the right moment, or the opportunity will very likely be lost. English and French gold the Anazeh would not look at, I think for this reason: in buying grain and other commodities from them the merchants in the towns to which they send, or to intermediate dealers who may visit them, the value of Turkish gold is known, but the Arabs probably think they might not be able to do so well with the other gold, of the value of which there might be some difference of opinion, and they might lose in the exchange. It appeared to us that whenever the Shaykh had made the bargain for us, there was no going back.

            On one occasion we had a large gathering of Badaween Shaykhs in our tent, Anazah as well as some from other tribes, to discuss some points of importance to themselves. It was an interesting spectacle.

            Had not Suleyman ibn Mirshid, Mamoud Bey, Shaykh of the Mowali, who was also there, and others, told us that there was a project on foot among the Anazah to thwart some measures on the part of the Turkish authorities, several incidents which occurred during our stay with the Sabaah would have indicated that some movement was intended, and as we had finished our business, so far at least as circumstances had permitted, we announced our intention to depart. Suleyman ibn Mirshid and others, who but a short time before had been so anxious to prolong our stay, did not now offer any opposition, nor press us to delay our departure. Jadaan ibn Mahaid, Mamoud Bey, the Mowali Shaykh, and several others had departed previously; others had arrived. Several councils had been held in the Shaykh’s tent, at which the leading men had attended, and on these occasions they wore their swords with silver hilts. Messengers ride up, and, after a few words with the Shaykh, disappeared. Mounted men were despatched, and I have reason to believe that a body of some fifty horsemen were sent off on a flying expedition. Suleyman ibn Mirshid’s countenance was graver than usual, and it was evident to us that when he conducted us out of camp and had set us fairly on our way one night, our departure was a relief to him. Events had become ripe. That night the camp was broken up; a fight ensued, and the tribes dispersed.

Working Arabs in the Northwest

by Ralph H. Smith (Western Horseman Apr ’51)

We fellows up here in Montana and Wyoming have a yen for good horse flesh, the same as they do in Texas or California, especially after the jeep can’t cross a washout or take up through the timber on a mountainside. Most Northwestern ranchers run cattle, sheep or horses on summer range in the Forest Reserve high in them mountain ranges, adjacent to our valleys and flat lands. Cattle and horses especially are left to rustle for themselves in the lush high mountain meadows and seek shelter in the canyons or timber. Seldom are they seen during the grazing period. Sheep, of course, have a year round herder. When these stock are gathered in the fall, believe me, it’s a job for a horse with plenty of lung capacity. Working from daylight till dark in timber, over rock, fallen trees, up cut banks, down steep canyons and sometimes at high speed up mountain sides, this takes a top horse. Here is where we find some of the outstanding Arabs at work. They are noted for their hard feet, endurance, will to do and adjustability. Just any ordinary ranch horses have been worn out at noon, their feet broken up and sore. Arabian blood, call it “hot” if you want to, has what it takes when endurance is desired, they go places the jeep bogs down, and much smoother.

This natural group of events and terrain has brought a good many Arabians into use here in the Great Northwest, (the mountain states) Montana and Wyoming. Arabs have been brought in to use as well as to breed up our ranch horse. It has been found, on many large ranches, that our horses were going soft. The Arab has proven his worth by putting tougher half-Arabs on the range (thanks to the U.S. Remount stations who placed some of the top Arabian studs in these states years ago, back in the 30’s).

No. 1. Gamhuri AHC 1776, sire of many good range Stock Horses. Owned by Cross-U-Bar ranch, Big Horn, Wyoming.

Gamhuri AHC 1776 (see illustration No. 1) was one of these Remount Arabs that left many good half-Arab ranch horses in the wide-open spaces around Lavina and Roundup, Montana. The late L.G.Mason, of Lavina, was a rancher who knew good horse flesh and always had the best for his boys to work several hundred whiteface, winter and summer, in the river bottom, foothill and plains country. L.G. told me that when Gamhuri was first used to bring in cattle, he soon caught on to their tricks. One day he was running some steers to head them into a north pasture; L.G. and Gamhuri came to a wide wash, and much to L.G.’s surprise, Gamhuri went sailing across the cut, landing at top speed on the other side. He was smart enough and game enough to risk his front quarters and neck as well as L.G.’s to out smart and out distance the steers. I later acquired Gamhuri and experienced this same thrill, but it took me 10 minutes one day to get him to walk through six inches of water, 7 or 8 feet wide; he didn’t want to spoil the water for drinking (an inherent characteristic of Arabians). He’d jump it and never touch a drop, if allowed to. His offspring are on the range, in the city, and many can be found in the stock yards working cattle and doing someone a service. Gamhuri now stands at the Cross-U-Bar ranch, Big Horn, Wyoming.

No. 2, Borkaan AHC 1383. Owner Jack Hammans, Shoshoni, Wyo., up.

Borkaan AHC 1383 (see illustration No. 2) is another little dandy, belonging to Jack and Alice Hammans. Here’s a stylish Arabian that can look like a million bucks after a week’s work in the hills, carrying either Jack or Alice, through brush, up mountain sides, into timber, through the Yellowstone river or any place they say to route out a cow to get her into the bunch; he’ll bring in a bum calf on the saddle along with his rider, if necessary. Borkaan has sired hundreds of fine Stock Horses for the ranchers on the Yellowstone near Livingston and Pray, Montana. He’s 14 years old and is still doing the job for Jack on his big cattle spread in Wyoming, near Shoshoni. Incidently, Jack and Borkaan are always a threat in the little home town fair contests for horses. Anything Jack decides he’s going to do with Borkaan, it’s generally done well, such as a quarter or mile race, hazing, calf roping, bulldogging or steer busting, for Jack has used Borkaan for a general purpose ranch horse.

Olnatar AHC 2628, another Western bred purebred Arabian, is developing into a using horse at the Smith Arab ranch on the Yellowstone. He was foaled at Ft. Robinson, Nebraska, Remount, served the Cross-U-Bar at Big Horn, Wyo., for a few years, where he left and scattered many pure and half-bred Arabs for using stock around some of the large northern Wyoming ranches. He has good prospects of becoming one of the top Stock Horse studs in Montana. Bookings for 1951 season show his general acceptance among using horse and pleasure horse breeders alike.

Ahanab AHC 1099 of the O.T.O. ranch, Livingston, sired many good range horses, even though he was small. He seemed to put the right stuff in the right place if the mare had anything. His colts were nearly always larger than he was. The same is true of Ptolemy AHC 2012, who stood at Springdale, Mont., for Hershey Roberts for years. Both these little fellows sired Stock Horses, trail horses, and many pleasure horses for the Yellowstone country. Chan Libbey, former owner of the O.T.O. ranch, has retired Ahanab, and Hershey Roberts takes Ptolemy along just like a member of the family. The last we knew they were in Bozeman, Montana.

Barab AHC 2512, up at Bigfork, Mont., on the Walter Robbin Hereford ranch, earns his keep three ways every season. He works cows and calves for Walter the year round, and on Sunday, Neta, Walt’s wife, takes her pleasure ride around the pastures and hills with him. Here’s a horse that puts the best to shame when it comes to working mountains. His feet are black and like flint. He can carry 250 pounds all day in the mountains and come in like a colt. I know, for it was after one of these days’ work that I first met Walt and Barab. He has the respect of the ranchers in his area.

Rifzadin AHC 1953, in the Lambert, Mont., area, left a good many fine half-Arab Stock Horses. His fine colts were ideal for the small wheat and cattle ranchers because of their easy keeping ways, gentleness and willingness ot work at any and many jobs on small acreages. He was a Remount horse with good breeding that passed on to his foal.

No. 3. Kodama AHC 1070. Owned by Quirk Ranch, Billings, Montana.

Kodama AHC 1070 (see illustration No. 3), tall and lanky, stood on the Wilbur Quirk ranch near Billings, Mont., for two seasons and left some very desirable results in cow horses from some of the top grade mares in this area. All are busy helping the drylanders tend a bunch of cows and horses. He’s another Remount horse from Ft. Robinson, standing 15-3. His foals are very attractive and will be fast using horses.

Khaldi AHC 3137, at Missoula, Mont., owned by H.O.Bell, is being trained for stock and ranch work because H.O. has a large cattle spread up near Ronan. He is young and will be very useful in the area because most of the horses are not too good quality (mostly Indian ponies in bred, out bred, off bred and cross bred.).

Ras-El-Fedawi AHC 1129 stood in Montana for years to improve the Stock Horse in many parts of the state, before he sold to a Wisconsin farmer and later died. I watched this fellow work in the sale ring. He responded to the slightest signal, turned on a dime, had a sliding stop second to none and could swap ends faster than the cook could flip a flap-jack. We got a bet on as to what he would sell for. My friend, Ed Wakely, said he wouldn’t go over $750. I bet him he’d go close to $1000. Sure enough, Ed paid off, he sold for $960 at age 10. We watched stockmen pay $250 to $500 for his colts during the morning sale. His Montana reputation will never be forgotten. Arthur E. Boswell, Vermillion ranch, Billings, Mont., who owned him, will never forget him either.

Wartez AHC 1953 and Azloumah AHC 3562 have just recently been brought into the upper Missouri river basin to help build up our range horses. Wartez is at home on the Crouch ranch out of Great Falls, Mont., while Azloumah stands at Big Sandy on one of the largest cattle spreads between the Missouri and Milk rivers. Both these studs are using horses on big spreads where even the men are not spared. The prairies are extended as far as the eye can see and the days are long, so the job for a horse requires endurance and stability.

No. 4. Dakar AHC 2132. Owned by Mackay and Mackay.

Dakar AHC 2132 (see illustration No. 4) came to our country last year from Reno, Nev., off the Hadley Beedle outfit. He sure got put to work on the Mackay and Mackay ranch near Ismay, Montana. Bill and Eva Bradshaw run this spread for the Mackays, and it consists of about 27,000 acres in the breaks and hills off the Yellowstone out of Miles City. They have 10 or 15 individual pastures for well bred Hereford cows, and it requires lots of riding. Here’s what Eva says about Dakar:

Although we have not had Dakar very long, we feel that we could not have found a better Arab for improving ranch stock. He is a wonderfully rugged Arabian, very well quartered and muscled, travels straight and can get out and get over the country. He is taking considerable interest in the stock work, and I can take him out and cover 20 to 30 miles in a day at an easy gait. You see, the ranch takes in about 27,000 acres and runs about 1,000 head of cattle, so we have to have horses that can get out and cover plenty of ground in a day and work on the way. Dakar can hit a walk close to five miles an hour, or he can hit a wonderful elongated trot which really eats up the ground. He has a nice canter in which he bounces along so easily that one hardly feels him touch the ground. He knows what to do with a cow or calf on a rope or otherwise, too.

No. 5. Bad Boy, half-Arab by Babyat AHC 460. Owned by Cross-U-Bar ranch, Big Horn, Wyo., S. Watts Smyth up.

Down Wyoming way at Big Horn, S. Watts Smyth uses a half-Arab for his ranch work in the shadow and on top of the rugged Big Horn range. It’s a sight to see this guy Watts come down down out of the mountains with a band of horses; sometimes there are about as many buck deer as mares, all coming at top speed with Bad Boy and Watts close on their heels (see illustration No. 5). Here’s what he says about Arab blood.

This horse is by Babyat AHC 460 (Ybabi’s sire) and out of an imported Irish Hunter mare. He stands 16-1 and weighs about 1250, and certainly fills the bill from a using standpoint. I formerly had two half bred Arab geldings as my personal mounts (now retired on account of age), but since breaking this horse have found that he takes the place of both my older horses. Bad Boy has been trained exclusively in the handling of other horses, wrangling broodmare and foals, moving horses to and from mountain pastures, along highways, as well as cutting them in corrals. He does not get ‘hot’ when running large numbers of loose horses in large pastures and has the speed and endurance to turn them in the roughest kind of country. A horse that will do this and still remain calm is to my mind harder to find than a typical cow horse. As you know, we don’t run many cows, but when he is called upon to handle them it seems child’s play to him after his usual horse work.

No. 6. Faram AHC 1043. Owner Jerry Angell, Cheyenne, Wyo., up.

Faram AHC 1043 (see illustration No. 6) is an oldtimer in the Cheyenne country and has plenty of land marks still running the long plains range in the form of top Stock Horses. He works for his keep on the Angell ranch out of Cheyenne where cows and Arabs make the life worth living for Gerald and Vera Angell. Incidentally, Vea Ward Angell used to entertain the rodeo crowds years ago with her stunt riding, so she picks the horses, uses them, and Gerald brings up the rear on a top Arab, too. Read what they say about Arab Stock Horses:

Faram is short coupled, well muscled, with excellent body conformation, having long, sloping shoulders, deep through the heart, powerful quarters and well formed withers. He is larger than some, standing 15-1, but size and height do not detract from his beauty, brilliant action and regal carriage. He has won several high honors and many grand champion trophies. He works stock with speed and knowhow. Endurance and level-headedness are two of his many attributes.

We understand young Joder at the Joder ranch near Cheyenne is training Rafflind AHC 4319 for stock work so he can help Doc with the roundup and branding.

Someone says: “How do the Arabs stand the severe northwest winters?” The answer: They do just as well as other breeds and on less feed. We only figure to feed half the normal amount of hay and grain or allow half the winter pasture per head of Arab as we customarily used to figure per head on other horses and some cattle. Dr. Crouch says:

We purchased Wartez in San Antonio, Tex., a southern horse, shipped him to Great Falls in the winter, unloaded in zero weather, and he never batted an eye. He took it in his stride with no trouble in adjustment, grew a coat of Montana winter hair and went about life without even so much as a sniffle.

None of the Arab people have much in the way of box stalls, barns or the shelter afforded the high pedigreed horses of the show ring. We look at it this way: “If they can’t take it, we want to know it now.” This is no country for a sissy!

Old Santa Fe AHC 882 was reared in the south and came north at the age of 21 and has foaled two fillies, one in February 1949 and another in April 1950, nine below zero for the first one and a late blizzard for the second. She’s coming 24 this spring and is in foal to Ybabi 2580, to drop her foal early in May this year. We’ll probably have a cold, wet rain with wind then, but she can take it. We don’t pamper them, and think they are rugged individuals, adaptable to any job, any climate, any person and any feed or pasture situation. In fact, they are the purebred horse from the deserts of Arabia and are the foundation of most of our good horses here in America. They really are the all around “doing” horses.

There are a great many more purebred Arabs, with good reputations that are outstanding, to help build good using horses in this great Northwest. It is regrettable that their history isn’t better known by the writer, because a good many deserve mention here. My apologies to those fine Arabians that have done so much to improve Stock Horse blood, which we have been unable to mention for lack of detailed information and pictures.

Maidan

From The Khamsat Vol 9, Num 4, Nov/Dec ’92
excerpted from The Arab Horse
Spencer Borden, New York, 1906

Maidan at 23
from The Arab Horse


Maidan is the last of the great horses that came to England from Arabia through India, whose name can have our especial attention. Many who knew him, including Lady Anne Blunt and the Hon. Miss Dillon, place him even above Kismet, and the opinion is concurred in by others who knew him only by his offspring. Maidan was foaled in 1869 in Nejd, a chestnut (as was Kismet), said by some to have been a Manakhi Hedruj, though this was doubted by others because of his great beauty, the Manakhi being a family of rather plain appearance, though great race horses He was brought to Bombay by Abdur Rhaman in 1871, and sold to Captain Johnstone, who immediately commenced racing him, though the colt was but two years old. Captain Fisher and Major Brough were also interested in Maidan; and as these English officers had tested him they were free in taking the long odds which were laid against him by the Australian sports who came to the races and were ready to lay against an untried colt. It is said that after Maidan won the Punjab Cup, the Australians had hardly money enough left to pay their passage home. For three years, from 1871 to 1874, Maidan continued his winning career, until no further matches could be made for him. Then, at 5 years of age, he was sold to Lieut. Col. Brownlow of the 72d Highlanders, as a charger. Brownlow was a heavyweight of nineteen stone (266 lbs.) with his equipment, yet Maidan carried him for twelve years in campaigns through the mountainous regions of India and Afghanistan, until the soldier was killed in the fight at Kandahar, at the end of the famous forced march of Lord Roberts’s Army from Cabul, three hundred miles distant. After carrying Brownlow for ten years Maidan won the Ganges Hog Hunt Cup, and also a four mile steeplechase across difficult country. At seventeen years of age, on the death of Brownlow, Maidan was bought by Lord Airlie who again put him to racing where he won a number of races both on the flat and steeplechases. He was then sold to Captain the Hon. Eustace Versey, who bought him to take to England. Leaving India on the troopship Jumna Maidan got as far as Suez, where the ship met the expedition going to the relief of Suakim, where Osman Digna was harassing the garrison, and was pressed into service as a transport for troops to Massowah, near the lower end of the Red Sea.

            So it happened that the old race horse and charger had his journey lengthened, to the degree that he stood on his feet one hundred days without once lying down, before he reached Marseilles. Yet Capt. Vesey raced him successfully at Pau, and afterward in England. He won a steeplechase when twenty-two years of age. When he had to be destroyed, because of a broken leg, at twenty-three, he was absolutely sound. In 1890 he was described in the London Live Stock Journal, as “fresh and well, with immense bone below the knee (he measured eight inches) and as clean in the legs as a four year old, notwithstanding the fact that he was hunted in Suffolk last year.”

[ED NOTE: Maidan is an Al Khamsa Foundation horse. He is the sire of the imported mare *Nazli (x *Naomi) who was imported by Randolph Huntington in 1893. That same year Mr. Huntington also imported *Nimr, a son of *Nazli sired by the Al Khamsa Foundation horse, *Kismet. Mr. Huntington proceeded to line breed to *Nazli and her blood forms a strong basis for the Drissula family in Al Khamsa breeding (See Khamsat Anthology, page 28). The foundation horse information on Maidan in Al Khamsa Arabians (1983) is as follows:

MAIDAN cb

1869 chestnut stallion, imported in 1871 to India by the agheyl, Abd Ar-Rahman. Imported in 1885 to England by the Hon. Eustace Vezey. Sire: db, Dam: a Mu’niqiyah-Hadrujiyah. Strain: Mu’niqi- Hadruj. Maidan is the sire of *Nazli.

According to the registration application for *Nazli at the Arabian Horse Registry, Maidan was said to be a “Managhi-Hedruj.” This agrees with Randolph Huntington, who imported *Nazli, and Carl Raswan. No strain is given for Maidan in the General Stud Book, which does give the following transfers of ownership: purchased “of Abd er Rahman, of Bombay, by Colonel Brownlow in 1871 … He was then sold to Major Brough, who sold him to Captain Fisher. He won the Kadir Cup (the blue ribbon of Pigsticking in India), and was then purchased by Lord Airlie. He was three years in Afghanistan, and was imported into England by the Hon. Eustace Vezey.” HUNTINGTON ancestral element.]

Arabia, and some of the Bedouins from The Arab Horse Chapter II

Articles of History: Voices from the Past

See Also:                                   Maidan                                  CHAPTER VI – SOME LAST WORDS   From: The Arab Horse Chapter II Arabia, And Some of the Bedouins by Spencer BordenNew York, 1906 from the Khamsat VolumeFoun Number Three August 1987           At the northeastern courner of the Mediterranean Sea, just below the point where the southern coast of Asia minor joins the western coast of Syria, lies the town of Scanderoon, the ancient city of Alexandretta. This is the seaport for Aleppo, ancient Haleb, about one hundred miles to the east and a little south, for centuries a trading centre whence go caravans of merchandise to the towns far down the Euphrates, and where are brought the grains and wool that come in return. Almost due east of Scanderoon, about five hundred miles distant, is Mosul, on the River Tigris, which from this point flows south and a little easterly about four hundred miles till it joins the Euphrates near Bussorah, the two rivers thus joined flowing into the Persian Gulf. About two hundred miles below Mosul is Bagdad, also on theit gris River. The Euphrates and Tigris nearly unite at this point, but again separate to join farther down, as already noted. Still farther east, nearly parallel with the tigris is the western frontier of Persia.

The line from Scanderoon to Mosul may be taken as the northern boundary of Arabia. The western frontier of Persia, then the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, mark its eastern boundary. On the south lies the Indian Ocean. On the west are the red Sea, Palestine, and Syria. From this rapid sketch one can get an idea of the great areas of the country. Coming in at the northwestern corner from the mountains of Asia Minor, the Euphrates River crosses the upper end of Arabia at a slant from northwest to southeast, and the valley of the euphrates ha for thousands of years been a most important route of Communication between the Orient and western nations. Indeed, until the discovery of the way around the Cap of Good Hope, and later the construction of the Suez Canal, it was the only route and its cities were the great centres of commerce for the world.

When we speak of Arabia we are apt to forget what the country once stood for. Between the Tigris and Euphrates is the land of Mesopotamia. Here was believed to have been the Garden of Eden – whatever that may mean – the place whence the human race spread abroad to populate the earth. Mosul, already mentioned, is the site of Nineveh, capital of the great Assyrian Empire. Fifty miles south of Bagdad are the ruins of Babylon, where the children of Israel were in captivity, and within ten miles of Babylon are still to be seen the remains of the Tower of Babel. El Uz, below Bagdad, on the Euphrates, was the home of Job; and from Chaldea, east of the Euphrates, came Abraham, father of the Hebrew race.

Through this land Alexander the Great marched to the conquest of India, after having overthrown the Babylonian Empire. In a straight line west of Deyr on the Euphrates, and half way between that point and Damascus, is Tadmur, the ancient Palmyra, capital city of Zenobia, that Queen who was conquered by Aurelian, and carried away to Rome to grace his triumphal entry.

Later in the Christian Era Mohammed established his religion at Mecca and Medina, far down in the Arabian peninsula. The Mohammedan chaliphs afterward made Bagdad their capital, and held a court there that was glittering in riches, the home of art, science, poetry; the scene of the Arabian Nights Entertainments until Timour the Tartar with his hordes of barbarians poured down from the North and drowned the country in blood. In ancient days this country was the home of science. Some of the earliest astronomers were Arabs of Chaldea, and our present system of numerals, which makes modern mathematical calculations possible, the decimal system, was an Arabian invention of Palestine, upper Africa, and Europe, which was an Arabian overrunning.

What is most germane to our present investigation, however, is the fact that this country is the place where the horse has attained his highest perfection; where he has been bred pure by a careful system of selection and adhered to for hundreds of years, a system, not departed from in the slightest degree. It has come to be acknowledged by the most intelligent breeders that thorough breeding in horses is chiefly a calculation of the amount of Arab blood they posses, just as gold stands as a measure of value in the currency of a country the value of a coin consisting of the amount of gold it contains.

The oldest and most exclusive registry in the world – the one at the foundation of all more recent works of the kind is “Weatherby’s General Stud Book of Thoroughbred Horses,” the only recognized organ of the English Jockey Club. The makers of that Stud Book recognized in the beginning, and today make the specific statement in writing that “Native Arabs, with the Barbs, are the source from whence the race horse springs.”

The history of the Arab horse is not merely the romantic tale of imaginative writers, though poets have sung his praises, artists have painted his graceful form on canvas, and sculptors have made use of him as their model. Job describes him in words that could apply to no other horse and the horses from the frieze of the Parthenon at Athens, the Elgin marbles now in the British Museum, could have been modelled from none but Arabians.

It is fortunate, however, that before it was too late, careful travellers, scholars and horsemen, such as Major Roger Upton and the Blunts, have visited the land of the Arab horse and written in books what they learned from original sources of this interesting subject.

Upton and the Blunts both made two journeys to Arabia in the years between 1870 and 1880. In both of Upton’s journeys he had the company and assistance of H.M.Consul General at Aleppo, Mr. Skene. His wanderings were extended both in distance and in time. Hon. Henry Chaplin, former Minister of Agriculture in Great Britain, breeder and owner of the famous Derby winner Hermit, tells us that Upton went a thousand miles into the desert south of Tadmur to get the horses procured for him, and he was gone two years. Both Chaplin and the Weatherbys are sponsors for the truth of every statement made by Upton.

After Upton went Mr. Wilfred Scawen Blunt and his wife, Lady Anne Blunt, a granddaughter of Lord Byron. Their first journey was in the winter of 1877-78, three years after Upton, and they covered much of the same ground as he, meeting many of the same people, thought they went also further east than Upton. Leaving Aleppo in January, 1878, they reached the valley of the Euphrates as soon as possible, then followed the river as far as Bagdad. From Aleppo to Deyr they had the company of Mr. Skene, who went with Upton. Then he turned back to Aleppo as his consular prerogatives went no further in that direction, the Blunts proceeding to Bagdad alone. From that point, after crossing the Tigris River they went north and east to Shergat, nearly up to Mosul, traversing a quite new country for Western voyagers. At Shergat they turned west to again come to Deyr, where Mr. Skene had agreed to meet them on a fixed day. This he was unable to do. He was old, infirm, and, while waiting, his successor came from England, so he was detained. The Blunts were most anxious to go among the Anazah Bedouins, with whom Upton spent the greater part of his time, and to meet such of his friends as they might, being especially anxious to see Jedaan, their War Sheik – known as the “Rob Roy of the Desert”. After great difficulties they got away from Deyr, and in due time reached Tadmur, about half way in the direct line between Deyr and Damascus. Near this point Mr. Skene overtook them, went with them among the Anazah, helped them to buy horses and continued with them to Damascus. From that point the Blunts returned to England via Beirut, Mr. Skene went back to Aleppo. The next winter found the Blunts again at Damascus, from which point they made a journey across the southern desert to Nejd, a part of the world not reached by Upton; in fact a place that no more than half a dozen Europeans are known to have ever seen.

The results of Upton’s visit were written in two books, “Newmarket and Arabia,” a sketchy statement of early impressions, and a more serious work, “Gleanings from the Desert of Arabia,” published after his death; now, unfortunately, out of print, and copies extremely difficult to obtain.

Lady Anne Blunt, also wrote two books of absorbing interest, “The Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates,” a journal of her first journey, and the “Pilgrimage to Nejd,” the story of the second. No one can read these books without being impressed with the veracity and intelligence of the writers. Weatherbey & Sons, publishers of the “General Stud Book,” say that they consider Mr. Wilfrid S. Blunt and Lady Anne Blunt the foremost living authorities on Arab horses. On these sources of information the present writing in large measure depends, wherever they touch the matter in hand.

Some of the individuals met by Upton and the Blunts were most interesting personages. Their introduction to the reader will help him to appreciate the sources of information, and the surroundings whence came many very great mares and stallions.

The Anazah Bedouins have always been the greatest horse breeders. Each tribe of the Anazah has its individual leader or Sheik, and at the time of Upton’s visit all the tribes of Anazah were united under one very remarkable man named Suleiman ibn Mirshid, who was called the Sheik of Sheiks. He was not only a great warrior, but also a wise administrator of te the internal affairs of the tribes.

Some years before the time of Upton’s visit the Shammar tribes had been united also under a great leader named Abd-ul-Kerim. The Shammar were Bedouins who came originally from Nejd, one thousand or fifteen hundred miles lower down in the Arabian peninsula. Something more than two hundred years ago, under the guidance of a Sheik named Faris, they had come north with their flocks and camels, invading the pasture lands always occupied by the Anazeh. These latter did not hesitate to wage war on the Shammar, and drove them across the Euphrates into Mesopotamia, to a point near Mosul. Abd-ul-Kerim was the descendant of that Faris in the sixth generation, and inherited the feud that always existed between the Shammar and the Anazah, periodical raids across the river being the consequence, in both directions; the land between the Tigris and Euphrates being considered the home of the Shammar, that between the Euphrates and Damascus, and reaching from the neighborhood of Aleppo far south toward Jebel Shammar, being the pasture lands conceded to the Anazah. The vital importance of protecting these pastures and the necessity for extensive ranges will be understood as we read from Lady Anne Blunt’s first book, that she saw together in one place a hundred and fifty thousand camels, besides thousands of sheep and many horses, all the property of a single tribe of Anazeh, the Roala, whose tents covered an area of 12 square miles. These great encampments had to be moved every few days because the pasturage was eaten down to the bare ground in very short order by the thousands of animals feeding thereon.

Yet Abd-ul-Kerim, though bound by hereditary obligation to fight the Anazah whenever and wherever they met, regarded the amenities of life, and his honour became a proverb throughout the length and breadth of the desert. It happened that at one period in his life, in his boyhood, he lived among the Anazah in the tents of Jedaan’s father. So, though when they had grown to manhood these two were bound to be always at war, Abd-ul-Kerin never forgot his affection for his boyhood friend. It happened then that Abd-ul-Kerim, in the course of the civil war, caught Jedaan’s forces in such a position that they were at his mercy. The trap was to be sprung on the morrow and Abd-ul-Kerim meant to push his advantage to the utmost. Yet he wanted to spare Jedaan individually. Therefore, the night preceding the day of the climax, he sent one of his men to Jedaan’s camp with his own white mare, bearing a message to Jedaan that the morrow meant certain defeat for Anazah, and begging him to accept Abd-ul-Kerim’s mare, and to ride her in the battle, as she was swifter than any animal belonging to the Shammar forces and could take him safely away. This Jedaan did and saved himself. Upton saw Abd-ul-Kerim’s mare in his possession when he visited the Anazah in 1875, and describes her.

Shortly afterward Abd-ul-Kerim, who had been successful in defeating the Turks who sought to subdue the Shammar, was betrayed into their hands by his secretary, an Armenian. They hung him from a bridge at Mosul.

His brother Farhan, a reprobate, submitted to the Turks, accepted from them the title of Pasha, and at the time of the visit of the Blunts to Mesopotamia was in receipt from them of a salary of Lb3,000 per annun.

The more noble of the Shammar, however, joined themselves to a younger brother named Faris, who declared unending war on the Turks and all who held to Turks. He was visited by the Blunts, adopted Mr. Blunt as his brother, by solemn rites, and is described by Lady Anne Blunt as a most brave, courteous and intelligent gentleman of distinguished appearance and manners.

It is this policy of “divide and conquer” that has marked the entire intercourse of the Turks and the Bedouins. So long as Suleiman ibn Mirshid lived he kept the Anazah tribes solidly combined. Shortly after Upton’s visit, however, and a little time before that of the Blunts, he allowed himself to accept an invitation from the Turkish Governor at Deyr, to visit the town and make a treaty of commerce between his tribes and the Turks, for exchange of products. At a banquet which was served to mark the close of the agreement, poison was put in the cup of coffee which was handed Suleiman, and he fell back dead as soon as he had drunk it. Confusion followed among his tribesmen.

Then the seeds of discord were sown among the individual tribes of the Anazah. Their herds of camels, their sheep, their horses were so numerous that it required a wise hand to guide them safely, assigning pasturage to each tribe according to its requirements. The Sebaa and Gomussa tribes had always made use of the district between Homs and Hamah, above Damascus, on the western side of the desert. The next year when they came to their usual district they found their brethren, the Roala, there before them. These had been told by the wily Turk that their fellow tribesmen of the Sebaa and Gomussa were not treating them justly. They were advised to take their great flock and herds, whose numbers have been mentioned, to the good pastures before the others could reach them, and were assured that the Turks would help them hold what they seized. In an evil hour they accepted the advice; Suleiman ibn Mirshid having been murdered was not at hand to arrange the difficulty, so when the Blunts were among the Anazah they found a factional war being waged. Sotaam ibn Shallin was leader of the Roala against the combined Sebaa and Gomussa. Suleiman had been succeeded by his two cousins, Beteyan ibn Mirshid and his brother, neither of whom had a tithe of his administrative ability, and as neither was able to wage the war against the Roala, they had made Jedaan their Akil, or War Sheik, to manage that end of the tribal business.

From what has been said it is easy to understand the wretched condition of affairs among the Bedouins for the ten years between 1874 and 1884. Let us remember, also, that during that period the Russo-Turkish war was carried on, so that relief from the usual aggression of the Turks, left the Bedouins free to fight among themselves. It was during the raids and counter-raids of this time that many priceless animals changed hands, to be run hot haste by their captors into the towns bordering the desert for sale to save them from recapture. It is certain that in the decade mentioned more high-caste Arab horses came out of the desert than ever before or since.

_______________

ABOUT THE AUTHOR – SPENCER BORDEN: An early American breeder of Arabians, Spencer Borden was at one time the owner of the famed Blunt mare *Rose of Sharon and the noted Ali Pasha Sherif mare *Gazala. Some well known Al Khamsa horses bred by Spencer Borden include the stallion Segario and the mares Ophir, Guemera and Gulnare.