The blog entry “Amer: a Saudi race stallion” and the ensuing online conversation has generated a heated debate, with potentially explosive consequences for many involved. To summarize using politically correct language: the stallion Amer, currently owned by Umm Qarn farms of Qatar, is an extremely controversial horse, owned by extremely powerful people. He has dozens of offspring around the world. Many people have questioned Amer’s purity over the years, more or less openly. Many people have written to WAHO about him (good luck with that…). There is lots of big money involved, and a lot of vested interests at stake. Fraud, when it does take place, takes place behind closed doors. You will not see the real pedigree in any WAHO-approved studbook records, and I don’t imagine anyone putting their lives and jobs on the line to enter a royalty-owned stud (how?), ask for DNA sample from Amer and his likes (how?), receive it, compare it with DNA sample from English Thoroughbreds in Jordan or elsewhere (which ones? how? culprits died long ago), send the whole package to labs for analysis (which labs?) and publis the results somewhere (where?). So all that’s left is people word, good faith, reputation, and…
I first saw Mubarak in 1989 when an old truck disembarked a batch of three horses at the farm of Hisham Ghurayyib in Damascus, Syria. I was told that the truck had just come from the desert area of al-Jazirah, “Upper Mesopotomia”. It was my first encounter with Arabian horses born and raised in the desert. I was 11. My father was breeding Asil Arabians back then and I was familiar with the first generation offspring of desertbred horses, or horses born on the fringes of the desert, but I had never seen the “real thing”. My very first reaction was one of disappointment. Not only were the three horses – a black Kuhaylat al-‘Armush mare, a fleebitten Kuhaylat ibn Mizhir mare, and a chestnut Hamdani Ibn Ghurab stallion – tiny, they were worn out, and extremely thin. They feet were badly damaged, and the hooves were so overgrown that the poor horses could badly walk. Were these the “horses of the desert” (khayl sahraa)? My father had given me his Nikon and asked me to take photos of all the horses, while he was checking them out and asking about their origins. I took a rapid photo shot of the…