Arabian Visions quote from Michael Bowling
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.
Isn’t that the truth?!
Excellently put.
Very few things annoy me more in the horse world than the concept of ‘improving’ the Arab, he is what he is and after a few thousand years of selection in the most testing arena on earth I think we can be confident that we have the definitive Arabian horse, whether he is to a persons taste or not is another matter but that is their problem not the Arab’s.
Breeding from animals with serious faults whether biomechanical, of character or in terms of athletic performance however is clearly just stupid, no matter what his pedigree.