Arabia, King’s Horses South of Al-Kharj from Arabian Horse Archives
This is yet another photo from the same collection at the Arabian Horse Archives, showing the mares of King A. A. Aal-Saud at his stud of al-Kharj. Notice the pretty head of the bay mare on the left, and the plain head of the chestnut one near, and the convex profile of the bay one in the center. Clearly, all desert mares, all royal mares, and all different. There was not one single type.
I like the stockings on the mare on the right! Speaking of heads, though, the fleabitten grey next to the bay with the convex profile seems to have the most dainty muzzle (at this angle at least) of the mares whose heads we can see.
I’d be happy to take that bay mare on the left, anytime.
Edouard you said “Clearly, all desert mares, all royal mares, and all different. There was not one single type.” I couldn’t agree more. And that is the crux of the problem with halter classes. Trying to compare each horse to a single “type” and then the politics get involved and that “type: morphs into something just awful IMHO.
Jeannie, Edouard: perfect. Once you choose “one” type, then that type has to slowly morph because trainers have to be on the breaking edge of the wave in order to WIN. So there is “mission creep.” And we end up with horses with championships in halter who can’t be ridden, and horses with championships under saddle who can’t be ridden quietly down a trail.
I’ll probably always liken it to the development of dog breeds during the Victorian Era, in the sense that deciding upon a breed standard ended up tightening the criteria for what could be constituted as a “typey” Arabian and disallowing for variation within the gene pool. With dogs, it often happened that siblings from the same litters would end up with COMPLETELY different phenotypes because of the plasticity of the canine genome and the potential for throwback genetics, and some siblings would be culled from the gene pool for not looking Typey enough while others, which perhaps looked more Typey, remained – regardless of whether or not they were in fact the superior dogs in terms of temperament, movement, conformation, health, etc. It’s the difference between having types of dogs based on their purposes (which were almost unilaterally performance-based as well as often behavior-based) to having breeds of dogs with a codified type that is appearance-based and therefore far more subjective than the performance-based/behavior-based type from which it was originally derived.
This is kind of what I end up thinking when I see certain talk of strain theory, breeding in the strain, and the fixation on a horse’s “x-strain look.” I’m sure most of it is very badly applied to Arabian breeding in the West.
I also think the horse has remained lucky in the sense that, unlike the overwhelming majority of domesticated animal species that has been in the hands of humans for thousands of years, its primary purpose remained rooted in the necessity of functional biomechanics. The last 100 years has really prompted a huge shift in the role of the horse in human lives, from an animal of utility to an animal of hobbyist sport and companionship. And if you only ride in tightly controlled environments and terrains, only ride for a little bit, or don’t ride at all, functional biomechanics – the sort that allows a horse to travel, say, chase a caravan 106 miles over the course of 11 hours, or to trace the path of the conquest of Alexander the Great from start to finish – aren’t really imperative; as long as it’s pretty, right?
Moira, I enjoyed our visit on that topic today. It is one that right minded people (us, of course!) can chew on the hours at a time!