On the transmission of Arabian horse strains and the notion of authenticity
In Arabian horses, strains are traditionally transmitted by the dam. This is how Bedouins did it for about half a millennium, for reasons I discussed elsewhere.
Strains, and their transmissions are intimately connected to the concepts of asil/atiq (roughly, authentic) in an Arabian horse. In other words, the daughter of an asil/atiq Hamdaniyah Simriyah and an English Thoroughbred is not a Hamdaniyah Simriyah. She is a hajin, a part-bred, not an Arabian horse. I think there is a universal consensus on that.
Now let us assume that this half-Arabian part-bred daughter of the asil/atiq Hamdaniyah Simriyah is bred to an asil/atiq Arabian for one more generation. You still don’t have a Hamdaniyah Simiriyah. You’d still have a hajin, a partbred with 25% Engligh Thoroughbred blood and 75% Arabian blood.
One more generation of breeding of this line to an asil/atiq Arabian horse will not get you your Hamdani Simri label back. You’d still have a hajin on your hands, this time with 12.5% Engligh Thoroughbred blood and 87.5% Arabian blood. The consensus on this horse not being an Arabian horse still holds, pretty much across the spectrum of the Arabian horse world. Where the consensus falls apart is on how far down the line a line can reclaim its lost Arabian horse status.
To me, the offpsring of a hajin and an Arabian is always a hajin, meaning hujna is transmitted indefinitely. And a hajin is not an Arabian but a partbred, even if the percentage of non-Arabian blood goes down to infinitesimal proportions. And a hajin has no strain, also by definition.
Others contend that after enough generations, the percentage of hajin blood would have become so small, and that horse would have acquired all the physical, mental and athletic attributes of an Arabian horse that it has earned its rightful, legitimate status as an Arabian horse.
I certainly understand this position. I have owned horses with smaller percentages of proven non-Arabian blood that looked and acted more like Arabian horses than several of my current horses of asil/atiq bloodlines. They were not just better horses, they also exhibited more Arabian horse characteristics of nobility, endurance, beauty, pride, etc. They deserve to be recognized for what they are, and not to be conflated with that they are not. Some European registries historically used the concept of “Arab rasse” to refer to these horses with small, proven percentages of Arab blood.
However, the concepts of asil/atiq no longer apply to these horses, and I, for one, believe that these concepts are not dissociable from what an Arabian horse intrinsically is. To me, there is no such things as a non-asil Arabian horse, or an Arabian horse that is a little bit asil (or 15/16th asil). It’s like being a little bit pregnant.
Makes sense to me, and this is why I really think that retroactively applying scientific findings to determine the asil or hajin status of horses of the nineteenth century is grossly anachronistic. Asil/atiq is cultural, and it deals in whole numbers, not fractions.
Bonsoir,comment pouvons-nous être sur à 100% que dans les chevaux asils il n’y a pas d autres sang ( turcoman, berbère ,Caspienne ,ect…)
Les seules affirmations bédouines ne peuvent toujours faire foi .
Effectivement le désert du temps passé n a pas de frontières ,je me permets de reprendre une citation de monsieur Aldahdah .
Les bédouins des pays du nord (Turquie,Azerbaïdjan,Turkménistan ) migré vers le sud ,idem pour les les bergers du sud qui remontaient vers le nord tous cela a créé un brassage ethnique au sain de la population humaine mais aussi au sain des différentes populations équines.
Je pense que l on serait sacrément étonné si l’on pouvait remonter dans le temp et constater que le cheval arabe asil n’ était qu un mythe un rêve occidental
Bonne soirée
C’est effectivement tout a fait possible. Berbere c’est peu probable, les barbes sont bien loin de l’Arabie. Caspien c’est aussi peu possible ils sont tout aussi loin. En revanche kurde ou turcoman, ca a pu et du arriver, surtout dans les zones de contact des Bedouins avec ces peuples la.
Bonsoir
Quand je pense au Caspien c’est à l ancêtre de cette race dont des ossements ont été retrouvés en Mésopotamie Concernant le cheval berbère effectivement l Afrique du Nord n’est pas la porte à côté.
Cela étant l invasion arabe vers le Maghreb c est fait entre le 6et 7eme Donc à cette époque on peut s imaginer que des croisements ont eu lieu entre (chevaux des arabes et les chevaux d Afrique du Nord)
Une partie de ces cavaliers arabes après un temp donné sont repartis dans leur pays avec des chevaux métissés .
Ces chevaux étaient probablement typé arabe et son passé pour telle en ramenant plus masse corporelle à certaines souches plus qu à d autres .
Bonne soirée
Je pense que la purete absolue de toute race — – et l’arabe en est une — aux fil des siecles et des vicissitudes de l’histoire est un mythe. Ce que les puristes essaient de perpetuer, c’est le type de cheval noble en usage chez les Bedouins d’Arabie au XIXeme siecle.
ABSOLUTELY!
Bonsoir
Auriez-vous des informations sur un étalon qui a été utilisé à Weil en Allemagne
Nom du cheval
Hedban 1848
Il a produit une jument
Nom de la jument
Boa 3 1854
Couleur baie toujours à Weil
La mère de cette jument s appelle
Goa3.
1844 à Weil
Et elle été asil
Dans l attente d une réponse je vous souhaite une bonne soirée
I’ve often had that problem when people ask me if a horse is asil or not. You can highlight individuals in the pedigree that are asil, but you can’t breed “towards it”, for lack of a better term.
A pet peeve of mine is people asking how much asil a horse is. That’s like throwing a rock through a pane of glass and asking how much not broken it is. (As a rider myself, I mean no disrespect to those horses)
“They deserve to be recognized for what they are, and not to be conflated with that they are not.”
I agree so wholeheartedly with this, on several points.
The first being that, as you’ve said, the horse you breed may only obtain a strain if it meets the criteria for transmission. If we are to recognize the Arabian as a product of Bedouin culture and breeding practices, then we cannot cherry-pick what constitutes an Arabian horse based on our external cultural influences and personal desires.
The second being: there legitimately is value in horses that are crossbred; being partbred, crossbred, etc, doesn’t make them inherently inferior. It just means they aren’t an Arabian, and their descendants won’t be Arabians. My Arabian/QH mare is not a Saqlawiyah Jidraniyah, for all that she goes back in the female line to Murana I. But she IS tail female to Murana I, and carries the same mitochondrial DNA, and she is a good horse. And that is still significant, in terms of carrying forth genetic material and maintaining diversity in horses at large, and recognizing the heritage of the horses while also recognizing that they are something different.
I feel strongly that it’s important to recognize ALL of the ancestry, and not just ignore the bits we may wish to ignore as marginal or insignificant.
Relatedly, I really appreciate the approach that Australia and South Africa have taken toward breeding partbreds. In Australia they include partbreds in the studbook, and the % of ancestry are also recorded, giving them papers while acknowledging them as partbreds. It gives these partbreds more value in Anglophone and/or Euro-derivative societies that place a premium on Victorian notions of purity and the valuation of a studbook registration. The AHA in the United States does register partbreds, but merely registers their horses as Half-Arabians, regardless of the %, which I feel does in some respect fail to acknowledge the effort breeders have gone to create high% partbreds. Sublisting these horses as Arabian-derivatives while celebrating their ancestry is a very practical approach. And South Africa, which I am sure Kate and Wilton above can testify to better than I ever could, seems to understand that a good horse is a good horse, regardless of its ancestry, and doesn’t seem to have the same austere view on partbreds that the USA does. There also does seem to be appreciation for breeding authentic Arabian bloodlines, given that SA has become a sanctuary for some bloodlines that have been lost elsewhere.
This is a cultural as much as a genetic issue- Beduoin society was nomadic, moving according with the seasons. That was a key factor, I think, in helping with genetic variability in a population where, according to records, the Asil Arabians were always a minority.
I venture to say that the real problem I see in some preservation breeding projects, where animals are breed in a very small and closed genetic pool, is the lack of variability, which is known to generate a host of other problems. Let me take the Asil Arabians of Argentina as an example, a matter close to me and which I have being looking into with some detail. Straight Egyptians, mostly if not all, from new blood lines, with a high percentage 40-46% of Nazeer blood. Even present imported stallions have been of this same high percentage Nazeer bloodline, One has to go back 8, 9 generations to find animals not related to Nazeer. That kind of linebreeding has its merits and demerits. You fix all the good qualities, yes, all the strenghts, and, if you are not carefull, you fix also the bad, the weakness… Looking at the pedigrees of the different generations, 1 from Nazeer, 2 from Nazeer, ecc some very sobering facts emerge, now at the 8th or 9th generation linebreed to Nazeer: Asil mares breed more easily to non asil stallions than to Asil stallions of their same bloodlines; their is a weakness in their progeny with these Asil stallions when tvey take, being that many of these foals die young; and last the Asil individuals tend to have less bone, many are of difficult temper, and in general die younger than their non-Asil companions. This, I believe, all points loud and clear on the dangers of a genetic bottleneck and the shear necessity to open the crosses with other Asil bloodlines not related. I think that present preservatiin efforts should center as much in preserving some bloodlines, something that is already being done, as in CROSSING those bloodlined.
I think much could be gained by making a list of Asil stalliions whose semen is shipped internationally.
These are just some of my observations and constitutes in no way a statistics of groups or a population. And certainly less it refers to some individual in particular. One can be very lucky or unlucky in the genetic lottery!