The daughters of the camels
Radwan told me a nice story yesterday. Veteran horse expert and merchant ‘Abd al-Qadir Hammami once asked the Shammar Bedouin breeder Bardan Ibn Jlaidan why the younger generations of his Kuhaylat ‘Ajuz were smaller in size and scope than the older generation. Bardan Ibn Jlaidan replied, with a Bedouin accent that Hammami loved to imitate: Hadink banat al-bil: “The others were the daughters of the camels“, meaning that they were raised on camel milk.
The story is from fifty years ago at least.
Just to clarify, meaning that the “daughters of the camels,” were the older generation Kuhaylat ‘Ajuz?
no, just the dams and grandams of his own mares, at the time he was still a nomad and had camels. He had/still has a specific strain of K. Ajuz, which I have been eyeing for two decades now.
Bring on the camels!
I fed dates to my mare as an experimental treat once, and it turned out she loved them, so she now gets dates whenever I can get boxes of them; I have found a store that sells camel milk near me, but haven’t got round to buying any to see what she would make of it!
(She is also a couscous fiend, and has joined picnics to see if any couscous is available for her to hoover up – and with her dinky little muzzle, she can get her nose into containers that were not designed for horses, so we don’t bring couscous to picnics on the farm anymore.)