In sharp contrast to the appalling number of non-Straight Egyptian asil foals born in the USA over the last few years, here are the number of registered Straight Egyptian (as defined by the Pyramid Society) foals registered in the years from 2001 to 2008: Two observations: first, the relatively hight number of Straight Egpytian foals born each year: 834 on average (a low of 717 in 2008, to be attributed to the economic crisis, and a high of 980 in 2001, in the prosperous American pre-9/11). Second, the flat trend: there is little variance between the yearly figures. No increase, but no sharpe decrease either. In other words, this segment of Arabian horse breeding has withered the storm relatively well. Now compare that trend with that of the non-Straight Egpytian Al Khamsa foals born in the USA over the same period of time, in the graph below: In blue, Straight Egpytian Al Khamsa foals born from 2001-2008; in red, non-Straight Egyptian Al Khamsa foals born from 2003-2008. The red line is dangerously close to the horizontal line that marks zero foals born, and hence, the extinction of the breed…
I was talking to Anita Enander yesterday, and she alerted me to an alarming statistical trend in the numbers of live births of non-Straight Egyptian, Al Khamsa Arabians in the USA, over the past few years. Just glance at the graph below: It plots the number of non-Egyptian, Al Khamsa foals born in each of the years 2003 (126 live registered foals); 2004 (140); 2005 (104); 2006 (92); 2007 (70) and 2008 (60). You can see that the number of births has dropped by half in 5 years. If this alarming trend does not abate (and I feel pessimistic about this), then in ten years’ time, by 2020, there will only 15 births of asil, Al Khamsa foals that are not Straight Egyptians. In other words, non-Egpytian asil breeding is on the brink of extinction. This trend gets even more alarming if you consider that the vast majority of these foals belong to three relatively organized, well-established and recognized breeding groups within Al Khamsa, involving more than a dozen breeders each: the Davenport group (roughly, asil horses from Syria tracing back to imports by Homer Davenport to the USA in 1906); the BLUE STAR group (roughly, asil horses from Saudi Arabia brought back by US…