It was a hot and humid summer afternoon in Marseille, France, where I was living at the time, and a rather less hot, albeit equally humid afternoon in Bristol, UK, where my friend (and fellow horse enthusiast) Hazaim still lives. We were in the midst of one of these heated phone conversations about the origin of a particular strain of Arabian horses, with little hope of converging any time soon, when Hazaim said: “Lets just ask the Bedouin who owns the strain!” “How?” “Well, just like we’re doing here: over the phone!” So we started calling our friends and contacts in Syria, many Bedouins themselves, and we asked them to give us the contacts of the Bedouins horsebreeders they knew. It often took days, even weeks, before these friends came back to us with the number we wanted. Sometimes we were lucky enough to get hold of them directly on a cell phone number; sometimes the number was that of the only household that had a land line in the village, and we had to wait until whomever answered the phone went and fetched the Bedouins we wanted to speak to; and sometimes, we were just informed that their neighbor or relative had packed his tent and taken his flock some place else, and that we had to call back in the…
A nice article by Gudrun Waiditschka about the 2007 WAHO Conference in Syria, with lots of pictures of desert Arabian horses. I was invited to make a keynote presentation about strains at the conference, but had to drop out at the last minute. This is the first time I regret not attending a WAHO conference. My friend Hazaim al-Wair, who prepared the presentation with me, confronted the crowds on his own, and did a superb job by all accounts. Hazaim you need to turn your laptop on, and start blogging..
The longer – and more oblique – answer is that it depends. On what? On personal preference, taste, sentimental attachement, etc. Some Bedouins fancy a particular strain because it was owned by their father or their grandfather; others because horses from this strain ahve achieved fame in combat, and made the name of the tribe rise above its neighbors’; others might favor one strain over another because it is rare.. Personally, I confess having a soft spot for two strains: Kuhaylan al-Wati and Kuhaylan al-Sharif, none of which are represented in Western Asil Arabian breeding. I like them because of their glorious histories and because their origins go a long, long way back.
The short answer is yes. Because strains are just family names given by the Bedouins to Arabian horses that are related through the dam line, there is no reason why one name should be “superior” or “inferior” to another (Is Smith better than Doe, or than Al-Dahdah?) It all boils down to the quality of the individual horse. Some horses are just better than others (I will defer the discussion of what my opinion of a “better” Arabian horse is), and if bred well, these horses may in turn produce better horses, and so on. Other individuals are less good, and if bred poorly, will end up producing inferior horses as well. If these individuals are females that in turn produce females so that the strains can be carried forward, then yes, the result in the very long run is one strain becoming better than the other. In essence, strains improve as a result of sound breeding over long periods of time, and degenerate otherwise. Nevertheless, all strains are all created equal. Lady Anne Blunt, who came as close in understanding Bedouin Arabian horse breeding as any other Westerner ever did, wrote that her stud manager, a Mutayr Bedouin by the name of Mutlaq al-Battal, never ceased to remind her than “All (strains) are…
This question was one of several that were asked to a virtual panel of American, German and Arab breeders and students of Arabian horses, to be featured in Al-Khamsa‘s flaghship publication, Al Khamsa Arabians III. You will no doubt have guessed that the question elicited as many different answers as there were ‘experts’. This was my answer to the question: “Strains are typically a collection of names (Kuhaylan, Saqlawi, Ubayyan, Dahman, etc.) that constitute the Bedouins’ way of identifying a horse and tracing its provenance. This would help them determine whether a horse is an Asil Arabian or not. Strains function very much like family names for human beings. The only difference is that Arabian horses’ family names (i.e., strains) are invariably transmitted through the dam, while in most societies human beings family names are transmitted through the father.”