Musings over skull measurements

I just bought Edward Skorkowski’s “Arab Breeding of Poland” from the website of a bookstore in Iowa. I read many excerpts of it before, but was never able to put my hands on a copy.  My first reaction was: “okay, so that’s where all these old photos of Polish Arabians on the Net comefrom..”. My second reaction while browsing through the book was one of astonishement at the enormous amount of information squeezed between the two covers. Then I started reading, and I was quickly turned off after a few pages. I need to vent my frustration on someone, and you, my patient reader, are going to be that someone.  So, what’s this whole business of linking strains to types based on skull measurements? “The family of Milordka is a Saqlawi judging from the measurement of the skulls”. Really? The last I heard was that Milordka was an indigenous Polish mare. Not a desert-bred mare. Not an Arabian mare. A mare with no origins. A kadeesh, in my language. Appending Arabian strains on indigenous  Polish mares to turn them into Arabians, and using some pseudo-scientific way such cranial measurements to justify this new “metamorphosis”, is a smart trick indeed. Nice try.…