Pictures of the day: Taan and Ward el Mayel
Pictures taken at Mustapha al-Jabri’s farm in 1991-92. Later, a photo of Al Ward el Mayel was widely used, especially in the “Arabian horse world” were he was pictured jumping in front of a wall, if somebody can remember. Please Edouard give us the pedigrees and strain of the grey Taan and of Al Ward al-Mayel. Thank you.
Ta’an brings back memories. I see you have a picture here of him as a youngster. The first time I saw him was in 1994 when Ta’an was mature at six years old. Randall Harris was hauling him from his quarantine on the east coast [U.S.] to his importers, Jerald and Debra Dirks, in Colorado. As was often the case, I always offered Randall an over night stay at out place when he was hauling horses so that he and the horses could rest at our place enroute.
Randall arrived after dark and backed up the trailer to our main barn and we put Ta’an in our large broodmare foaling stall to give him lots of room to rest. We stood in the middle of the stall as Ta’an quickly pranced his “figure eights” around us calling out to the unseen mares in the dark outside that he could smell in the cool air. As he moved swiftly about the stall area I could not get over how graceful and elastic his movements were, never touching us and never a misstep in what was a strange and very dimly light barn. Finally I asked Randall to halter him and stand him up in the stall so that I could get a look at him. Randall put the halter on him but Ta’an wanted to continue his dance in search of the mares, not wanting to stop. Randall’s calling out “woa, woa” meant nothing to Ta’an. He ignored Randall as if he was not there. Then Randall remembered that he was given a small piece of notepaper which contained the Arabic words which Ta’an would recognize. So he quickly pulled out the rumpled paper from his back pocket and said “La’ah”, [I hope I am using the right phonetics] and the horse stopped suddenly in his tracks. Randall and I both laughed as we forgot that Ta’an did not know any English. I later told Danah Al Khalifa this in a phone conversation and she also laughed because she knows how keen these horses are to the nuance of every word. Anyway, I was amazed at Ta’an’s wonderful clean correct limbs, fine but with good tendon, long forearms, short canon bones, good depth of hear girth and powerful shoulders and nicely blended quarters and of course excellent movements. His eyes were large and lustrous, and his temperament was wonderful. It was a pleasure to have him in our barn though for too short of a time.
Randall and I sat on the hay next to Ta’an’s adopted stall and talked horses well into the night and every so often Ta’an would come to the stall end as if to join in the discussion. Randall’s loyalty to this horse was such that he insisted on staying out in the barn with sleeping bag through the night with him before leaving the next day.
Little did we both know at that time that two years later Randall and I would be staying up late drinking tea with the Tai Bedouin, talking horses as best as we could with my pocket book translator, and then camping with them in their tent. It shows that horses like Ta’an can be such great introducers to the roots of this breed.
Thanks Joe. That was great.