There an ongoing email conversation between a number of us about coming up with a list of existing priority stallions of Davenport lines with no progeny so far, which should not be gelded if at all possible, or only gelded after being collected and frozen, following the recent gelding (for valid reasons) of a good stallion. This goes along the lines of other ongoing conversations in preservation circles in the USA about prioritizing preservation projects, because we obviously can’t save them all. If you have suggestion for horses on this priority list, feel free to come up with them. One rule: it can’t be your own stallion. It would be too easy.
Not sure how clear this drawing of the mare Sahara is. She is the desert bred Kuhaylat al-Mimrah mare imported to Poland from Arabia in1845 by Count Julius Dzieduszycki, but don’t you think she looks an awful lot like the mare GH Janet (Thane x HB Diandra) at 0:21 in the youtube video here:
I am back in hotel room in Tunis after a long way at work, and I am looking at a copy of Al Khamsa Arabians III I brought with me to give to a friend in Egypt. I just came across a paragraph from an aticle by Michael Bowiling, reprinted from the Sept/Oct 1997 issue of Arabian Visions that I had not noticed before: As to the notion sometimes encountered that preservation breeding is not compatible with selection for improvement or with breeding “quality horses”, I think there are two separate ideas here: we want to improve our individual animals, in the sense that breeding to combine more of the best features of our kind of horse in each individual. What we do not subsribe to is the conventional vision that one can “improve the breed”, which seems to mean, in practice, “make it look more like some other breed”. Most of us are breeding within specific pedigree limits precisely because in our experience they turn out specific kinds of good Arabians”. I wish I knew how to put things as concisely and eloquently as Michael does.