Last week, I wrote about the quest of Robert Mauy’s friends, Jean-Claude Rajot and Louis Bauduin of France, to regenerate the bloodlines of their Arabian horses with the importation of stallions from the Arabian desert, or North Africa. Jean-Claude and Louis’ quest first took them to Tunisian and Algeria in the late 1980s. They saw many horses at the government studs of Tiaret (Algeria) and Sidi Thabet (Tunisia, where Louis took the photo of the mare below), as well as with private breeders. They also took many photos. However, the horses they liked were either too old or not for sale. In the 1990s and 200s, as Syria was slowly opening up to the western world, Jean-Claude and Louis undertook several trips to the Syrian desert, the first of which took place with Jens Sannek and Bernd Loewenherz. A great book by Sannek and Loewenherz resulted from this memorable trip. in 2008, Jean-Claude and Louis visited several marabet (Bedouin studs) of the Shammar Bedouins, including Ibn Jlaidan’s (Kuhaylan al-‘Ajuz, a Najd marbat), Ibn Ghurab’s (Hamdani Simri), Ibn ‘Ufaytan (Ma’naghi Hadraji), and al-Ghishm (Kuhaylan al-Wati); with an eye towards learning about the desert horse in its natural milieu, and perhaps buying a young stallion or…
Anita Westfall has asked me to post this photo of Sir (Tripoli x Dharebah) at age 4, which was taken by Miss Ott at Craver Farms in 1962. Charles is in the photo. She wanted to use the photo to illustrate a comment in a comment she recently posted, which I quote below: “My very favorite photo of the perfect foreleg is one taken of Sir as a youngster. Perhaps Jeanne has a copy handy?? Long forearms, broad flat knees, and short cannons with broad, flat bone. Anyway, long legs on Arabians are usually the result of long cannons (combined with ‘normal’ forearms), while those sturdy horses with short legs often have short forearms.”
*Aziza (Gamil Manial x Negma) was *Roda’s half sister. *Roda was mentioned in a recent post. In 1996, RJ Cadranell wrote an article on the two sisters in Arabian Visions, which you read here. Like *Roda, *Aziza was imported to the USA by W.R. Brown in 1932. All this I knew from before. Having read F. Klynstra’s book “Nobility of the Desert”, which has lovely pictures of the mare Faziza (Fa-Turf x Azyya by Kenur x Aziza), who went to G. Olms in Germany, and her son Tufail (by Kaisoon, photo of Tufail below), I also knew that Aziza had left some asil descendents in Europe, rich in the blood of desert horses from Saudi Arabia imported to the USA (*Turfa, *Sunshine, *Nufoud, *Tairah). What I didn’t know is that the line might have persisted in the USA. The mare Sharziyya, a 1963 full sister to Faziza, has left a small number of descendants in this country. The youngest mare from this line is Shar Fazima (Hafid Faserr x Shar Azima) a 1986 mare bred by the Krausnicks’ of Shar Char Farms. She looks like the last (in the tail female, that is)asil from that line in the USA now and if alive,…
My daughter Samarcande (Edouard x Delphine), a 2008 part-bred Arab, is now 18 months, and claps her hands when she sees a horse’s picture on the laptop. Not a good sign for the future..
Also from “The Authentic Arab Horse”, but from Lady Wentworth, this time.. “Ears: these are all-important. A stallion’s ears should be small, exquisitely shaped, sharply cut, and thin at the edges. They should be also of marvelously delicate modeling, beautifully chiseled, the tip delicately turned inwards, the points being very sharply defined. Hearing is very acute and sensitive, lop ears are unknown and slack ears are a very bad fault. A good head can be discounted by badly carried ears.”
This is from a handwritten note which I copied from Lady Wentworth’s “The Authentic Arabian Horse”. I don’t have the book with me (it’s in Lebanon in my father’s library), but I vaguely recall that it is an excerpt from Lady Anne Blunt’s manuscript, which she was working on before her death in 1917, and which her daughter Lady Wentworth later ‘integrated’ (plagiarized?) in her book “The Authentic Arabian Horse”. “A straight profile should not be a defect if the forehead is very broad, the eyes placed low and very large, and the muzzle small”. Below is a headshot of Reema, a desert bred Hamdaniyat Ibn Ghurab, bred by the Aqaydat tribe of the Middle Euphrates region (the marbat originally belongs to the Shammar). Reema’s head is a good illustration of the above quote, although her eyes could be placed a tad lower.