MONTHLY - February 2007
 
     
   

Like from some old historical Days .....

 

The Arabian horse comes from a breed based on a long history of tradition and knowledge. The bedouins of the desert understod their qualities, their strength, their disposition, and their reliability. And also beauty was one of the important qualities that they enjoyed. Everything started hundreds of years ago, the exact date - nobody knows. However, today we are aware and focus on pedigrees, lines and breeding ancestors. The first studbooks in the desert countries had been written in the middle of the last century. Some educated people and royalties from those days and before, living in Egypt and the Middle East, realized the importance of regular registrations for the whole breeding, made their private notes and wrote down their observations and experiences with individual horses and in the breeding. Some of those are meanwhile published in articles, mansucripts or books. In Europe and the western world we might find earlier registrations and studbooks, but in the Near and Middle East the first formal published one was in Egypt in 1948 by the RAS (= Royal Agricultural Society), the 'predecessor' of the today known EAO (= Egyptian Agricultural Organization). However, it is a fact by the times and old days, that many many decades back, the specific names of ancestors in a pedigree cannot be given. There were no official registrations, no written studbooks in the 19th and the early 20st century. But even if a specific name of an ancestor of this time is not known, the origins must be known and be clearly to identify. From which area, which family, which strain, or which tribes. Especially in the straight Egyptians, all ancestors must trace back to the Arabia, upon the individual definition of each of the different breeding organization existing all over the world (i.e. the Pyramid Society, the Asil Club, Al Khamsa, the so-named 'Blue List' of Mrs. Ott, and others).

The old bedouins regarded and estimated their horse as a part of the family, as their friend to trust at any time and in every situation. They cared for them very well on them, they lived with them in their tents and were always surrounded by them. Mostly they owned mares, as those would have been much easier to have around, and they could bring them foals. Even in the time of wars, the bedouins preferred to ride mares - with a stallion they would have risked to get discovered from their enemies as a stallion could easily scream hearing the other horses or scream,ing for the mares. On the other hand, it had been mostly stallions that the kings and celebrities of those times rode in official parades and enjoyed in their private studs.

The above picture may take you a little bit back to those old days, bedouins being surrounded by their mares. The picture was photographed in the ancient city of 'Diriyyah', in Saudi Arabia, by a special permission of the Saudi government and the kind assistance of the excellent team of the 'King Abdul Aziz Arabian Horse Center' in Dirab!

   
   

 

 

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