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The origins of the purebred Arab horse are in the desert and from the Arabian peninsula. In the new industrial times and during the 20th century, it moved over in numbers to the western world and countries. The imports to Europe and America started, and continued to peak before it reduced again in the number of imports at the mid to the end of the 90s. In the change of centuries, and during the 21st century, the trend has turned around. The Arab people from the desert and Gulf area came to Europe, America, Australia and the western world to buy the purebred horses and bloodstock to bring them back to their home countries and their countries of origin. Indeed, the world is always going round......!
Today's life makes the world a smaller place, and nearly everything is within easy reach. Within a few hours we can cover huge distances and continents by plane, journeys that once took in the old days months sometimes even years. Just one, two or three decades ago, we all knew about horses or stallions of what we would like to breed to that were based in other continents, but without the opportunity to use them due to the distance. Today, the semen of stallions is shipped regularly from one to another country or continent travelling, goes by plane around the globe. Foals are born from matings where the mare and stallion never meet alive, never smelt each other or could show whether or not they liked each other. Old or old-fashioned breeders have no doubt experienced at one or another time that a mare refuse a specific stallion when he came close to her, or tried to jump on her, but she would not do it with another stallion! Nature has sometimes it's own 'reasons', maybe to call it sympathy/ antipathy, maybe a deep instinct - at least, something we often can't see or understand, and might not accept as humans-in-ratio. We always think we have to control and decide everything - but there are many things, we cannot!
In our modern life with the advanced technology and possibilities, we sometimes dream of the old days with it's simple life. In the Arab horse industry, we love to read about and to watch scenes of Arabs in the old days and in the desert. The time, when the horses were the companions of the Bedouins, treated by them with the highest respect and as part of the family. Breeding was a philosophy of experience built over hundreds of years. Sometimes the bedouins travelled for days or weeks with a mare or a stallion just to do the mating with another horse that they had heard about. Maybe we simply just like to hear those fairy tales? Or maybe we should embrace these "good old stories" that they might help us to remember the origins and source, that even before our days, there had been great horses, breeders and true experts, who solved those difficulties and even distances in the intention for breeding a good foal and bringing the mare and stallion together. Those bedouins, tribes and horse experts established the base for us and provided the bloodstock of our horses today - and we should consider them not just in a simple life comparing to our luxury days today, but consider some of the old values, experiences and heritage of the desert.
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