I have added a new “poll of the week” feature to this blog. This week’s poll is about your favorite horse breeding master: Lady Anne Blunt, Carl Raswan, Homer Davenport, Abbas Pacha or Faisal Ibn Turki? Scroll down to see it, and cast your votes!
This is one of my all-time favorite Asil Arabian mares. LD Rubic (Plantagenet x Tarrla) is unique for several reasons: 1) she is a great-grand-daughter of the mare *Nufoud, a Kuhaylat al-‘Ajuz mare from Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud born in 1925 and imported to the USA in 1931 by Albert W. Harris. You cannot get any closer to the source, and what a source! A Kuhaylah from Ibn Saud! Too bad we don’t know which Kuhaylat al-‘Ajuz that is. 2) She is a daughter of the fabulous stallion Plantagenet, an Asil Kuhaylan al-Hayf of the line imported to the USA by Homer Davenport in 1906. I am a big fan of the Plantagenet progeny, of which Palisades CF is another representative. Below is a picture of Plantagenet. 3) She doesn’t have any lines to the horses imported to the UK by Lady Anne and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. Blunt horses are in the pedigrees of most Arabian horses worldwide. The late Carol Lyons called these horses “Sharp”, by opposition to “Blunt”. 4) Her line was saved from extinction by a person I have enormous respect and admiration for: the late Carol Lyons. Carol had acquired Tarrla (Tarff x Kaluga by Alcazar), Rubic’s dam, in 1979. She was the…
A lot of “Photos of the Day” these days.. it is easier to keep a quasi daily writing routine when posting a photo with a short comment, as opposed to posting in the “Strain of the Week” series, which requires me to access research material, old and new.. Don’t take this as a sign of laziness however, it is just that work has been keeping me busy recently, or busier than usual. Today’s photo is about La Tisa, a gift from Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud, (then Sultan of Najd and Hjaz) to Charles R. Crane, a noted Arabist and philantropist, and of the two main actors of the King-Crane Commission, which was to have such an impact on post-World War One Middle Eastern politics. La Tisa was imported to the USA in 1931. A year later, the Sultanate of Najd and Hijaz became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Crane had helped the USA secure some of its earliest oil concessions in Saudi Arabia, so if you are feeling the heat at the gas pump and ran out of people to blame, you can just blame it on him.. Joking aside, the gift of that mare was probably a small “thank you” gesture from Ibn Saud to Crane, for brokering some of these oil deals.…
It tends to change every other day. For what it’s worth, here is today’s top ten: 1. Reem al-Oud, (Ubayyan Suhayli x Ubayyah Suhayliyah) desert bred from the Shammar tribe, born ca. 1980 2. Reema, (Ma’anaghi Sbayli x Hamdaniyah Simriyah) desert bred from the Aqaydat , born ca. 1975 3. Jauza, (Dahman Shawan x Kuhaylat al-Krush) desert bred from Mutayr, born ca. 1910, imported by Lady Anne Blunt to her Sheykh Obeyd farm in Egypt 4. Bismilah (Besbes x Berthe), a Jilfat al-Dhawi, bred by the French government at the Pompadour stud, born ca. 1985 5. Sahmet (Hadban Enzahi x Jatta), from the strain of Murana, bred by the German government at the Marbach stud, born ca. 1960 6. *Turfa, (Ubayyan al-Hamrah x Kuhaylat al-Khorma), bred by Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud at the Al-Khorma stud, imported to the USA by Henri Babson, born ca. 1930 7. *Bint Maisa al-Saghirah (Nazeer x Maisa) , a Dahmah Shahwaniyah, bred by the Egyptian government (the Egyptian Agricultural Organization) at the al-Zahraa stud, born ca. 1950 8. Sayfia, desert bred from the Fad’aan tribe (Ma’naghi Sbayli x Ma’anaghiyah Sbayliyah), born ca. 1985 9. LD Rubic (Plantagenet x Tarrla), a Kuhaylah, bred by Carol Lyons, born ca. 1980 10. Ceres (Aramis x Dharebah),…
Let me share with you this picture of one of my all-time favorite desert-bred Arabian mares. *Al-Hamdaniah, the bloody-shouldered mare, was a present from the governor of the oil-rich al-Hasa province of Saudi Arabia to Admiral Richard Lansing Connolly, who brought her to the USA in 1947. Superstitious Bedouins believed that the large reddish spots on some horses’ shoulders were the blood of slain warriors, and considered that these horses brought bad luck to their owners. Others, on the contrary, valued these marks as a sign of purity and good breeding. Take a look at similar markings on the body of the mare Helwah, a Maanaghiyah Sbailiyah born in the Syrian desert in the early 1970s.