Why are Arabian horse strains transmitted through the dam?
We don’t know for sure, but it is possible to list a number of hypotheses.
One hypothesis has to do with the lifestyle of the Bedouins who created these strains. Bedouins were nomads who roamed the steppes of Arabia searching for food and water for their flocks. Migrating Bedouin clans and families crossed paths around wells and pastures, mingled there for a few days, information was exchanged, social events took place, horses were bred to each other, then everyone moved on, often in opposite directions. Foals resulting from these breedings were born eleven months later. If the sire belonged to a clan or family that was following a diffrent migration pattern from that of the dam, he could be hundreds of miles away at the time of the foal’s birth. Because the most practical way to identify a foal and trace its origin was to associate it with the parent it was born next to, foals took the strain (i.e., the family name) of their dams, rather than their sires’.
A second hypothesis may have to do with Bedouins not keeping the same numbers of mares and stallions. It was not uncommon for a tribe that was endowed with two hundred broodmares to maintain only two or three breeding stallions. Why? One reason was that stallions were rarely used at mounts during raids; another was the simple biological fact that one stallion could have a virtually infinite number of offspring in the same period it took a mare to produce just one foal. Using sire lines in those cases would greatly limit the number of lines within a tribe and make the process of keeping track of the offspring – in a society where writing and record keeping were almost absent – much more complicated.
A third hypothesis is that ownership laws stipulate that the owner of the dam is normally the owner of her foal at birth. It would then seem natural for a Bedouin to attach the strain of the foal to that if its dam, since he owned both, and since the stallion could be and was often owned by another person.
Amazingly ,In the Thouroughbred world,there is ”The Lowe classification”‘ M.Lowe gave number from 1 to 25 ,if my memory dont betrays me,according to the dam line calling them ”families” i.e the family of ”l’enchanteuse” was family #5 if the descendants of this mare were good runners so the fame was that family #5 was a ”running” family while i.e # 8 was less runners and so on
Thank you Edouard. Hypothesis #1 is my favorite because the visual is so strong: Bedouins at the crossroads, the well, the breeding, the celebrating, the “market” feeling to all of it. Then, on into tribal solitude again to await the birth of foals.