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[RC] Arabian Bloodlines - k s swigartJohn Teeter said: Heidi said: As for lines, the various local variations on Crabbet-plus and pre-WWII lines predominate pretty much everywhere, from what I can see. In this country, the lines that rise to the top in endurance with much more frequency than they start are CMK, pre-WWII Polish, and various early desert imports, with a few smatterings of early breeding from other sources. In Oz, it's Crabbet/Colonial breeding--much the same thing. In Europe, Persik is as good an example as any--3/8 Crabbet, 3/8 pre-WWII Polish, and 1/4 pre-WWII French. The key is the old breeding before people altered it for "aesthetic" purposes. And that basic concept is pretty much in play in top horses world-wide. Since virtually all (other than the Egyptian imports of the 60s and 70s, but RSI, a well respected breeder of horses that have succeed well in endurance used many of those) of the horses that "people have altered for 'aesthetic' purposes" also come from this same stock, the fact that most endurance horses come from "old breeding" isn't very relevant. All of the current stuff coming out of Poland comes predominantly from pre-WWII Polish as well, but for the past couple of generations their breeding selection criteria have been for the "aesthetic purposes" of the showring market so the fact that it, too, comes from old bloodlines is irrelevant. What matters is not what horses are in the back of your pedigree, there were very few arabian breeding programs 50-100 years ago so everybody's base stock came from some combination of these "old" programs. What matters is the selection criteria that have been used in RECENT generations. If your horse's close up pedigree is riddled with horses that have succeeded in the modern (I would say mid-seventies to present) showring, its chances of success are much lower than if you get one from a program that eschewed the showring and bred horses for some athletic endeavor; athough you may still get a "throwback" to its earlier generations (which is why you could buy such horses in the killer pen, the showring people were throwing away their "throwbacks"). In the modern showring stuff, you will still find CMK horses, pre-WWII Polish and other old DB horses. It will probably be a few more generations back, since the show breeders breed, compete, and select their breeding stock at a younger age (so their generations are fewer years), but it is still there. The horses in your purebred arabian's pedigree that were born before 1945 are virtually irrelevant. Prior to 1945 pretty much ALL Arabian breeders were making breeding decisions based on athletic capability. What matters is what selection criteria have been used recently. Here in the US, there are a number of "preservationist" breeders of which the CMK is one of the most prominent, that eschewed the modern showring fairly early on, so you have a better chance of getting a good horse from one of them. However, none of this preservationist breeding was done on a large enough scale for any particular names to totally dominate. And this is why the names in your horse's pedigree "don't matter." What matters more is the names of the breeders in your horse's pedigree. Ideally you want your horse to come from a breeding program that has been selecting for athleticism all along, and as long as you do this, the actual individual horses in the pedigree don't make all that much difference. What you want to look at is not the names in the pedigree, but the selection criteria the breeders of those horses used....and you want to look at the ones that are up close, not those that are 50 years and five generations back. If you look in the pedigree of *Padrons Psyche, today's modern halter showring poster child, you will find Kann and Korej, Arax, Ofir (the sire of Witez II), Naseem all over it. It is almost all pre-WWII Polish and early Russian (although there isn't any Crabbet). And if you look at Huckleberry Bey (another modern showring poster child), you will find scads of early American imports and lots of Crabbet and a whole bunch of the assoreted Pre-WWII polish horses that have been named here. The question is not what original bloodstock were people using, since their purebred arabians, by definition everybody is using the same original bloodstock. The question is what were the selection criteria for the horses that are only 2 generations back. Your chances are better if those selection criteria were for some strenuous athletic purpose that required consistency and longevity. The names in the pedigree don't matter, because most of them will be unrecognizable, since people who were making these breeding decisions were NOT doing it on a large scale and they had no place to show off their horses and gain name recognition. There are a few recognizable names, and you would do well to go with these (assuming that the horse you are getting is not a crop-out from that breeder), but this doesn't mean that you should discount others because the names aren't recognizable. There are many horses with unrecognizable names whose parents have been selected for their athletic ability that make fine bloodstock. kat Orange County, Calif. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net. 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