Robert Mauvy’s teachings and his disciples

My friends Jean-Claude Rajot and Louis Bauduin have been breeding Arabian horses for a long time. They are the students and friends of the late Robert Mauvy. Robert Mauvy is, simply put, the Westerner who came the closest to understanding the Arabian horse and to breeding it as its original custodians, the Bedouins of Arabia, bred it. Forget Carl Raswan, forget Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi of Algeria, forget Prince Mohammed Ali Tewfik of Egypt. Only Anne Blunt, in the later years of her life, equalled Mauvy’s ‘art of breeding’.

While Mauvy is little-known outside of France and North Africa– despite his longtime connections with some of the fathers of the Asil Club movement in Europe, such as Foppe Klynstra, I am certain that his fame will skyrocket when an English translation of his small yet gigantic book “Le Cheval Arabe” will become available. This masterpiece was my Arabian Horse Bible, from age 10 until today.

One of the key teachings of Mauvy, as laid out in his book, is that the Arabian horse, like all things living (plants, animals, and even humans) is the outcome of the environment in which it is bred. If you take it out of its original environment, it will live certainly live and it may even prosper, but it will soon loose the specific characteristics that make it an Arabian horse. This seemingly simple and straight-forward notion has some important consequences; it means that Arabians bred outside of their original environment — the steppes of Arabia — can no longer be considered to be true Arabians. The remedy Mauvy proposes to Westerners who want to breed Arabian horses that retain their original desert characteristics is three folds: 

1) First, these breeders need to breed their horses on dry terrain, the nature of which is as close to the limestone terrain of the Arabian desert;

2) Second, they need to select their stallions the same way Bedouins used to select theirs: since ghazus and desert warfare is no longer an option, a good proxy is endurance racing (as opposed to halter shows). Mauvy and his supporters have eloborated a series of tough guidelines for such endurance races; some of these involve competitions where horses are supposed to gallop non-stop for more than 10 miles. Any horse that reverts to trot is immediately disqualified. The horses that successfully complete competition like this one and others can be used as stallions.

3) Third, they need to go back to the desert every 3 generations to infuse the blood of desert-bred Arabians into their horses. If a horse-buying expedition to Arabia Deserta is not possible, then a less desirable, but still acceptable recourse is the importation of Arabian horses bred in North Africa, the climate and terrain of some parts of which closely resemble Desert Arabia.

Since they started breeding Arabians, Jean-Claude Rajot, Louis Bauduin and their friends have been turning the teachings of Mauvy into practice — at least the first and the second ones, above. As far as the third axiom — breeding back to desert-bred stallions each three generations — was concerned, Rajot and Bauduin were using the stallions Ourki (Ourour x Oureah by Ghalbane)  and Jazour (Saadi x Izarra), as well as other sons of the stallion Saadi, Ourki’s older full brother: Cherif (Saadi x Zarifa) and Shawani (Saadi x Zarifa). Saadi, Ourki and Jazour were the sons of mares bred in North Africa (Oureah in Algeria and Irarra in Tunisia), and hence were “second-generation desert”, Oureah aslo being the daughter of the great Hamdani Simri stallion Ghalbane imported from Syria/Lebanon in 1945. By the time the daughters of these stallions came of age, Rajot and Bauduin were faced with the need to “go east” and look for desert-bred stallions to breed them. The next blog entry tells the story of the outcome of their search…