When I was a kid, there were not many horse books I could read. I had no access to the hardcovers in my father’s library, like Lady Wentworth’s “Authentic Arabian Horse” or W.R. Brown’s “Horse of the Desert”. I was too afraid to tear a page anyway, and they were not easy to handle. I could read the softcovers though. One of these, and my favorite, was Robert Mauvy’s small book “Le Cheval Arabe”. I knew it by heart, almost line by line. In it was a chapter called “Hamada”, where the author describes how the dam of his new filly (a 1975 chestnut daughter of Irmak which he named Hamada, out of Shawania, who was by Amri) refused to let her nurse, and how she had to be bottled-fed, and how she later turned out. I somehow became attached to this filly without knowing her, and her story stuck in my head. In 1994, my father and I went to France for a benign medical treatment, and we looked up Mauvy’s surviving horses in the Studbook. Some of them were owned by Louis Bauduin, who lives a couple hours south of Paris, so we went to pay him a…
There is a heated discussion going on (in French, though) in another thread about Arabian type(s) in general. A photo of the desert-bred Ma’naqi Sbayli stallion Nimr Shabareq (bred in Syria, now in France) started the debate. To grossly summarize, one side thinks the horse is basically off type (in other words, just an ugly looking Arabian), and the other thinks it’s representative of one of many types of Arabians to be found in the Syrian/Arabian desert, yet a type Western eyes are no longer used to. The first photo shows the horse as a growthy two-year-old in racing condition. I am now posting a more recent photo of the same horse, taken last year, when he was three years old.