Assuredly this is an odd angle photo (of the horse)-over sweating with heat, poor hocks-soft and spongy looking -possible knee problems and hiding a low back and high back end. on the positive side beautiful color(real or clairol dye) and it is a sad thing that the natural beauty of the Arabian Horse is so misunderstood that it must be doctored up to be an abstraction of its real and gorgeous self. A tragic example of what an Arabian Horse should be. really sad..I much prefer a sturdy sort.
that was US national champion Magnum Psyche, who was widely suspected to have undergone neck/throat surgery, but the case apparently could not be proven in court.
Cropping and rotating the pictures in an attempt to make the horse appear to show show system breed type- flat back- overly long slender neck- is very common. I recall years ago being told by one of the students of the guys who developed the – hide their poor coupling school of showing that the purpose of the flat back was to disguise poor conformation- all proven in the above photo.
best
Bruce Peek
In some points a good horse can be similar to a giraffe, according to old arabian descriptions.
1/ The front part (neck and head) is longer than the rear part (back and coccygian vertebraes).
2/ The neck is long enough to allow the aseel horse to reach the soil with his lips without folding or separating his legs.
3/ Some old authors (not all) want the rear legs to be shorter than the front legs. May be the barb horse or his crosses look that way because of their sloping hindquarters.
If Mro’o El Qays have met giraffes we would have some interesting comparisons 🙂
The culture of showing horses is always changing and it is not a new phenomenon but well removed from the breed’s origins to be sure. I recall Danah Al Khalifa (former wife of the ruler of Bahrain and an accomplished horsewoman who helped establish the Bahrain stud books) commenting years ago on her first visit to the US in the 1960s and noting how bizzare it seemed to see show goers sweating down the necks of stallions for show purposes. She went on to tell the story of how desert bred horses build up fat in the neck and above the rump for survival in hard times and it was a genetically valued feature. She explained about how one old Bahraini stallion had been kicked in the jaw and could not eat for quite awhile until his wounds had healed but that he had survived on the stored fat in his neck. I was pleased to hear that because so often the desert bred Arabians coming to the west were easy keepers and the building up of fat in the neck was a feature of that. I always liked the “old world” look of desert bred stallions.
The functional problem is revealed when they move out of that darned pose, with front legs too short and the back legs too long so the horse can be posed stretched out but with a perpendicular hind cannon. It does not make a riding horse.
“2/ The neck is long enough to allow the aseel horse to reach the soil with his lips without folding or separating his legs.”
So true! My husband Charles always wanted to see that. An old customer of ours, a retired and probably uneducated coal miner, always kept a handful of corn, and would drop a few grains when standing by a horse. If the horse could drop his head to get the cord, and not do “the splits”, the horse would pass the test. It is a test of balance.
It is the test Caliph Umar Ibn al-Khattab, the second after the Prophet, used to determine whether horses were pure arabians or not, at a time of the Islamic conquests when horses were being crossed, because the conquerors had gone so far outside Arab lands.
I had a literal “LOL,” moment!
Well! THAT explains it!
Assuredly this is an odd angle photo (of the horse)-over sweating with heat, poor hocks-soft and spongy looking -possible knee problems and hiding a low back and high back end. on the positive side beautiful color(real or clairol dye) and it is a sad thing that the natural beauty of the Arabian Horse is so misunderstood that it must be doctored up to be an abstraction of its real and gorgeous self. A tragic example of what an Arabian Horse should be. really sad..I much prefer a sturdy sort.
that was US national champion Magnum Psyche, who was widely suspected to have undergone neck/throat surgery, but the case apparently could not be proven in court.
Cropping and rotating the pictures in an attempt to make the horse appear to show show system breed type- flat back- overly long slender neck- is very common. I recall years ago being told by one of the students of the guys who developed the – hide their poor coupling school of showing that the purpose of the flat back was to disguise poor conformation- all proven in the above photo.
best
Bruce Peek
In some points a good horse can be similar to a giraffe, according to old arabian descriptions.
1/ The front part (neck and head) is longer than the rear part (back and coccygian vertebraes).
2/ The neck is long enough to allow the aseel horse to reach the soil with his lips without folding or separating his legs.
3/ Some old authors (not all) want the rear legs to be shorter than the front legs. May be the barb horse or his crosses look that way because of their sloping hindquarters.
If Mro’o El Qays have met giraffes we would have some interesting comparisons 🙂
The culture of showing horses is always changing and it is not a new phenomenon but well removed from the breed’s origins to be sure. I recall Danah Al Khalifa (former wife of the ruler of Bahrain and an accomplished horsewoman who helped establish the Bahrain stud books) commenting years ago on her first visit to the US in the 1960s and noting how bizzare it seemed to see show goers sweating down the necks of stallions for show purposes. She went on to tell the story of how desert bred horses build up fat in the neck and above the rump for survival in hard times and it was a genetically valued feature. She explained about how one old Bahraini stallion had been kicked in the jaw and could not eat for quite awhile until his wounds had healed but that he had survived on the stored fat in his neck. I was pleased to hear that because so often the desert bred Arabians coming to the west were easy keepers and the building up of fat in the neck was a feature of that. I always liked the “old world” look of desert bred stallions.
The functional problem is revealed when they move out of that darned pose, with front legs too short and the back legs too long so the horse can be posed stretched out but with a perpendicular hind cannon. It does not make a riding horse.
“2/ The neck is long enough to allow the aseel horse to reach the soil with his lips without folding or separating his legs.”
So true! My husband Charles always wanted to see that. An old customer of ours, a retired and probably uneducated coal miner, always kept a handful of corn, and would drop a few grains when standing by a horse. If the horse could drop his head to get the cord, and not do “the splits”, the horse would pass the test. It is a test of balance.
It is the test Caliph Umar Ibn al-Khattab, the second after the Prophet, used to determine whether horses were pure arabians or not, at a time of the Islamic conquests when horses were being crossed, because the conquerors had gone so far outside Arab lands.