Strain assignment in the Tunisian Studbook

Severine Vesco and I were doing some background work on the Tunisian sire lines today. We found that the Volume IV of the Tunisian Studbook (1977-8-9) had the strains of the horses assigned in the good-old-fashioned European way… by using the strain of the tail male ancestor.

The stallion Rial, for instance, was given the strain of “Seglaoui” while he was actually a Jilfan Dhawi, because his dam traces to Wadha. Rial goes back to the Tahawi-bred stallion Nasr in the sire line (Rial-Esmet Ali-Hazil-Fadjer-Nasr), and Nasr was a Saqlawi or “Seglaoui”, hence the mistake.

Similarly, the stallion Soufyan, was given the strain “Hamadani El-Samri”. That’s the strain of the desert-bred stallion in his sire line, a horse called Dynamite II. Dynamite II was himself recorded as being “de race Hamdani Semri”. The error becomes even more conspicuous when you notice that Soufyan and Sibawaih, the stallion right above him on the screenshot above, are assinged the same strain while tracing to two different dam lines, one to Mansourah, and the other to Emtayra.

Finally, the strain of the fourth stallion on the screenshot, Raoui, a head sire at the government stud, is listed as Hamdani. However, Raoui’s tail female is to the mare Yamouna, imported to the French government stud of Pompadour in 1876, and recorded as being “from a Najdi strain”. No Hamdani on that side. On the other hand, Raoui’s sire, the desert import Cheikh El Ourbane, is recorded as “Sire: A Hamdani, Dam: A Mouannakia, Importé en 1945 de Syrie.”

Whoever prepared that studbook, back in the late 1970s clearly did not know how Arabian strains worked. But that’s okay: even Prince Mohammed Ali Tewfik of Egypt, a recognized authority on the breed, didn’t (cf. Saklawi II, son of Saklawi I, but in reality a Dahman Shahwan).