Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

> Yes, my purpose is two-fold.  First of all to continue with the lines
> that are 'best' for **me** .  -what *I* like, that meet *my* needs. -
More breeders need to start from that premise.

>   My
> requirements include that I be able to change clothes or fix breakfast
> while we're riding down the trail.
LOL!  Sounds like me...  That is the classic Arabian disposition, and is
one thing that has been too much altered by the parade of breeders between
"then" and "now" that you describe.

> we talk about Desert-breds. - but that still has to be defined.  Do you
> mean Nejd, Syria or Arizona?
This is a biggie.  One of the things that is hard for many to grasp is
that "Egypt" is NOT the desert of origin of the Arabian horse.  That
concept has been really warped around in modern thinking.

> purity is relative and I think dependant on your definition.  Mine are
> 'pure' in their group in the sense that they've been breed within a
> foundation group.  Are they Asil in the religious sense?  Their papers
> say the experts say so, but I don't think God reads the papers.  Does
> that make them good endurance horses?  No.  -has nothing to do with it.
Well put!

> This is getting long, but bear with me.  What's important to me, in a
> 'purity' sense, is that I have found that the BEDOUIN horse (not
> Egyptian) most exactly meets my needs, and they are a little hard to
> come by.  When I look at a pedigree, one of the main points to me is the
> question of how many in-between breeders have there been?  I'm not being
> snobby about having imports, - what I'm considering is that the
> Egyptians, the Polish, the Russian, the English, the Americans, all have
> different things that are important to them, and that they breed (very
> fine horses) to those standards.  I know that I prefer what I've come to
> understand to be the Bedouin standards.
And I'd add one more thing to that--which is knowing the standards of
those breeders that have come in between.  That is what attracts me to the
majority of the CMK breeding--the breeders over time have tried to
maintain those classic qualities, and have not tried to "alter" the breed
to fit some esoteric perception.  There are exceptions to that, and I
don't include the results of such programs in my own program, even though
they are technically CMK.  Likewise, if somebody took Nejd horses and
selected for a few generations to try to make them look like, say, Magnum
Psyche, you might not put them back into your program either, despite
their pedigrees.

> In the words of Jane L Ott.(BAHC 1961 supplement)  "....If they wanted
> black coffee and inadvertently got a little cream in it, would they then
> add sugar and milk and brandy and pepper and salt and vinegar, just
> because it already had some cream in it and 'nothing else can make it
> any worse'? (Please note that some of those things go very well in
> coffee- if you don't happen to want it straight.)..."
Excellent analogy.

Heidi




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