My Little Hony

[My Little Hony]

Had the great displeasure of witnessing a riding instructor whipping a horse so violently in a public parking lot that the horse, whom she was supposedly trying to teach to relax, reared and nearly flipped on her. She managed to jump off and hang onto a rein to keep him from bolting, but it was a truly terrible thing to watch. She started out by lashing the horse on either side of the neck with the ends of the reins, and once she was on the ground, she went to the dressage whip. 

I hate that I just watched. I do not know how to intervene when someone is so obviously angry in a way that doesn’t lead to the horse being punished even more harshly. But maybe intervening brings the person back to their senses. I hate the complicity in the silence of watching at a distance, and the complicity of the automatic socially acceptable polite response to the rider justifying their cruelty as “just teaching the horse to behave”. Maybe that polite response is a fear response, fear that the rider turns their anger against me, and maybe if I’d said something, she’d have stopped walloping the horse and started screaming at me, which would have been better for the horse. 

I need to unlearn quietness, so that the next time I see someone abusing a horse I can intervene in a way that helps the horse, not just in the moment but also afterwards. Lashing a horse with the reins until it rears in a panic is not ever acceptable, and it is so normalised by some equestrians that they have no shame doing it in a public, non-equestrian situation. And yet … as a horse person of thirty years experience, who was there, on the scene, as the abuse was happening, I stood by and let it happen. It’s not good enough to be kind to the horses I care for if I watch another horse being abused and do nothing.

[My Little Hony]

Abba evenings are good evenings.

[My Little Hony]

Had an unnecessarily dramatic ride with Abba today, because of a very rude sand mine lorry driver, which left Abba’s nerves shot and me fuming. 

We added a little more distance today, going up to the yard and then turning left for some limited hillwork. Abba was brisk and happy once I had persuaded her we weren’t going out to the reservoir, though that did take some doing, and she wiggled and bulged and walked through my leg aids for several minutes. She was very eager to be moving, and threw in some jogging steps here and there, a good sign that I haven’t asked too much of her. 

Going through the yard, Abba waltzed merrily past Angus and Snowflake, and then jumped when one of the Boerboel bitches shook herself as we went by. That was the only spook, even though she was passing heavy machinery, which she usually hates and has to bow out and circle around. In the field behind the yard, she knew exactly which way to go without me telling her, and marched along, ears pricked, head turning this way and that. 

I had planned to go from that field onto the big hill and then immediately out through the gate above the sand mine, as that would be the shortest way home, but as soon as Abba set foot on the big hill, she was full of excitement, so I let her keep going at a walk. She would tell me when she was ready to turn for home, I figured, but she never did. She wanted to go on and on, and I had to make the call instead, choosing to turn her when the path gave way to ploughed land, too heavy for her legs at this point in our rehab. 

We then went out via the sand mine gate, descending the long steep ramp into the mine. Abba jigged a little at first, then found her balance and walked nicely down. I was very impressed, as she is so unfit and unused to a rider’s weight, but her muscle memory is still there, and she rocked back on her haunches to make a controlled descent. 

All had gone well up till this point, but as we were approaching the closest sand mine exit, a lorry driver came up at speed, a plume of sand billowing from behind the tyres, he was travelling so fast. I had just enough time to raise one arm and start flagging him down before he was roaring around the hairpin turn, too close for Abba, who spun and tried to bolt through the mine. I got her back together, turned her to face the lorry, and the next moment we were caught in the cloud of sand he had thrown up. It was so thick I could see nothing beyond Abba’s ears, the world blotted out and all turned to orange. 

I was angry about such reckless driving, and headed straight down to the site supervisor; on the way, though, we had to pass the lorry that pulls the drag to scrape the road. Abba would not go by for more than a minute, spinning back and forth across the road, she was so upset by the other, speeding lorry. The site supervisor knows me and knows the horses, and saw Abba’s fear of the little lorry with the drag; he said that the driver of the speeding lorry has been repeatedly told to slow down and repeatedly refuses to, but he is now going to escalate the complaint, as he has seen a friend hospitalised from a wreck with a bolting horse. I am very grateful, and I hope that the speedy driver either slows down or is banned from the farm. 

Abba was happy to have her alfalfa after her horrifying experiences with lorries, and enjoyed her full body massage as well. I imagine, though, that we are now back to square one with passing heavy machinery and lorries, which is very annoying, as she had really started to relax on our handwalks along the road. 

[My Little Hony]

Including two flakes of alfalfa in Abba’s diet has helped make the difference to her weight, I think, as her ribs were less prominent to the touch today. Managing her for insulin resistance is proving harder than I expected, but I do believe we will strike the right balance. She currently has a molasses-free ration balancer, designed for IR horses, and if the electricity stays on and the feed mills can keep manufacturing, she should be getting a molasses-free 13% meal, also designed for IR horses, which will help meet her energy demands. 

Despite the heat, she has already grown a very deep winter coat, much thicker and longer than the younger horses’. Can’t tell if it’s an indication of a cold winter coming, or that Abba is getting on in years; of course, it might also be that she has always gone for the woolly-mammoth-in-miniature look for winter.  

[My Little Hony]

Kizzy knows how much I like her, and is using that to get extra attention. She’s not sure, though, that being fly sprayed is the attention she wanted, but it does net her lots of carrots. 

[My Little Hony]

A good Sahara who let me use the bot knife on her girth area and her fore cannons without warning me off. We are finding out what pressure works for her, but also gets the job done, and she is reminding me that it is better not to be greedy and to back off instead of trying to take more than she is comfortable offering.

[My Little Hony]

[asilarabians]

The Arabian Horses of Abbas Pasha

It’s here, finally! After 18 months of keeping our mouths shut (and many many more years of this for our friend Edouard, who runs Daughters of the Wind), @mylittlehony and I can talk openly about this!! This is… really cool. Really really really cool.

See, anyone who has dipped their toes in Arabian horses is going to know about Straight Egyptians, and they’ll probably have heard of Abbas Pasha, the Viceroy of Egypt, who sent envoys all across the Middle East to gather desert bred Arabian horses and bring them to his collection in Egypt, which he enjoyed right up until his assassination in the middle of 1854. His young son, Ilhami Pasha, inherited the entirety of the collection when he was just 18 years old. It was known that Ilhami Pasha had to disperse the horses in an enormous sale in 1860, but very little was known about the specifics, the horses, the buyers, and more. What has been a fascinatingly opaque piece of Arabian horse history that had an enormous impact on the trajectory of the breed now has an explosion of information coming out of a chance discovery of a document that was, as Edouard puts it, hiding in plain sight within the Raswan Index. Nobody had ever bothered to translate the Arabic, and didn’t understand that Carl Raswan had published scanned photos of the actual sales list of the Arabian horses of the Abbas Pasha stud that were sold in the final month of 1860.

Not only does this connect us with many of the largest historical breeders of Arabian Horses in Egypt a la the tradition that brought Lady Anne Blunt into the fold, but also it connects us to the studs of Europe - the breeding depots of Vittorio Emmanuelle II as he began his bid to unify Italy under a single banner; the German studs, with a wonderful contextualization of Baron von Hugel; the French studs; and more. Furthermore, it connects with the Sal Oppenehim banking family, and there is a connection to the Confederate spy Edwin de Leon, who brought an Abbas Pasha Arabian stallion across the ocean to the United States, where the horse had to run the Union blockade during the American Civil War in order to make landfall and be gifted to the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis.

Some of what has been discovered or otherwise pieced together bumps back the known pedigrees of many of the foundational Arabian horses by quite a few generations, all the way back deep into the desert with their Bedouin breeders. It’s introduced the discovery that there was an unknown sireline in Arabians via Lady Anne Blunt’s favorite stallion, Mesaoud, who was believed to have carried the Zobeyni sireline but is now known to be a Ghadir sireline stallion. Ghadir, of course, being Abbas Pasha’s own favorite herd sire, and who was later bought in the 1860 sale as an older stallion and thereafter exported from Egypt to Germany, where he was also utilized as a herdsire.

I can’t even begin to explain how incredible this information is. This is. Really. Truly. WILD.

[mylittlehony]

It’s been thrilling to work on this book, and to dig through nineteenth century records to cross-reference the sales catalogue with the horses that made their way to Europe and the United States. There are still some gaps in the record, but we found more material than we imagined possible at the outset. 

The impact on Arabian pedigrees is astonishing, and the relationships between a number of foundation horses are finally made clear in this book - including relationships between horses in Abbas Pasha’s stud in the 1850s and horses that were still in the desert when the Blunts made their two trips in the late 1870s. That was a moment that gave me gooseflesh, when I realised just how many generations back the pedigrees can now be recorded. 

We understand so much more, now, about the history and provenance of not just the Arabian horses of Abbas Pasha’s fabled collection, but also of horses that went to Weil-Marbach and to Bábolna, and horses that would later be exported from Egypt to Crabbet Park. And these were horses whose descendants shaped the Arabian horses found in the western world - so the Arabian horses that stand in our fields and stables today. This book links them, definitively, to horses that came from Bahrain, from Syria, from Arabia, from Oman, tells us who their owners were before they were acquired by the agents of Abbas Pasha, puts them firmly in their context as horses of the Bedouin. 

It’s been very exciting, and it has been a tremendous honour to work on this book alongside Edouard and Moira. We had some moments of awe-struck wonder when we identified well-known horses in the sale catalogue. We had many hours of going cross-eyed and muzzy-headed while combing through the French and Italian stud books in particular. We spent days arguing about naming patterns of horses, and a particular pet hypothesis of mine was thrown out for having no evidence, only to be revived months later, towards the end of the work on the book, and then thrown out all over again (Mabruka and Mabruk, I forgive you for making us go round in circles). It was fun, it was frustrating, it was highly rewarding, and, well, those months have now turned into a book. An actual book, crammed with detail and so much new information. 

It’s fantastic. I can’t wait to see it.

[asilarabians]

This means I’ll need to go and update my information on the Zobeyni sireline, since that is no more within Al Khamsa, and instead is Ghadir, via Mesaoud. 

Which is REALLY cool when you consider that we previously only had a very thin line to Ghadir (aka Gadir) via his three daughters from the Marbach-Weil program. In the old AK Roster, this was represented in some of the last of the asil representatives of the Polish programs and the Babolna program. The all came down via 1911 gm Soldateska (WL) (Souakim (WL) x Sylphide I (WL)), and they came to the United States via 1970 gs *KEM Safir (Hadban Enzahi (RAS) x Sahmet (W-M)). *KEM Safir left an extremely thin line of descent thereafter:

Fan-Safir is deceased, Zahia Al Rafiq is deceased, Zafira CW has proven to be very difficult to breed and has not had a successful foal yet, and meanwhile, Halimah CW is currently with Desert Heritage Arabians and has produced two fillies, both sired by Straight Egyptian stallions - one with the El Deree sireline, and one with the Jamil El Kebir sireline.

I’ll repeat that: there are just 4 horses currently alive today, all mares, who carry this particular collection of bloodlines forward within the United States.

Meanwhile, if we look at Mesaoud, who’s pedigree records are functionally the same for all his descendants, save going beyond his OWN pedigree to clarify a few things:

I’ve said this before, but there’s almost always a difference in numbers between horses in a sireline that carry forth the y chromosome haplotype and general pedigree descendants that carry an ancestor anywhere in their pedigree - and Mesaoud/Ghadir is no exception. This is a very threatened sireline with just a mere handful of stallions in the Straight Egyptian gene pool and a handful more in the wider combined source programs. The Doyles have actually been a huge repository for this sireline, and will probably be the primary (if not only) source of it going forward, unless the SE community can step up to the plate and do something about the present supremacy of Saklawi I and Jamil El Kebir.

[mylittlehony]

Also, one of the cool and unexpected side-effects, as it were, of Edouard’s discovery is that the new information tells us more about the ancestors of horses like the Holsteiner sire Ramiro, the Olympic dressage geldings Rembrandt and Valegro, and Grand Prix showjumper Cornet Obolensky. We know more about the nineteenth century Arabian element in the ancestry of Hanoverians, Holsteiners and Trakehners now, because all three registries were influenced by Amurath 1881, who is inbred to Ghadir 3d x 4d. Ghadir is the damsire of Amurath 1881′s sire Tajar, and is also the sire of Amurath 1881′s third dam, Kereja VI. So wherever Amurath 1881 goes in a pedigree, Ghadir goes with him. 

To quote from an article by Gudrun Waiditschka (which looks at the sireline of Amurath 1881, hence the emphasis on Bairactar, rather than Ghadir): 

When we leave purebred Arabian breeding and turn towards Shagya-Arabian breeding, we find some offspring of Amurath 1881, who got a name in Warmblood breeding of various different countries, eg. with Amurath I 1898 (out of 314 Gidran XXIV) in Hannovarian breeding. Amurath I was widely used and six of his sons were breeding stallions at Celle, where you can find his blood through Amulett II and Amateur I, among others, in the pedigree of Gotthard (*1949), a famous sire of show jumping horses.

Another stallion, Amurath II 1896 (out of 248 Shagya V), ended up in Schleswig-Holstein. Here, he had 11 licensed stallions, in Lower Saxony three, in Trakehnen one. But he also had a certain influence on Dutch Warmblood breeding, and so the Olympic horses Hickstead and Valegro carry Amurath blood.

However, the most significant influence on European sport horse breeding was through the famous sire of show jumpers, Ramzes (*1937). He had Amurath 1881 twice in his pedigree - and Bairaktar 28 times - through his dam, the Shagya-Arabian mare Jordy. Ramzes founded a true sport horse dynasty and many horses whose name start with ‘R’ trace back to him: Retina under Fritz Thiedemann, Romanus with Hans-Günther Winkler in the saddle and Ramona with Alwin Schockemöhle. They all wrote equestrian history and furthered the fame of Ramzes in Holstein. The strain of Ramzes was later split into two branches: From Holstein, the Raimond-Ramiro-branch spread and stamped show jumping worldwide. Today’s show jumpers such as Rubinstein, Rock Forever or Cornet Obolensky – he is said to carry Bairaktar more than 100 times in his pedigree – they all have Ramzes among their ancestors. From Westphalia, the Radetzky-offspring through Remus I-Romulus I-Romadour II prevailed, but this time in dressage: Remus with Harry Boldt, Mariano with Dr. Josef Neckermann and Tiga with Heinz Lammers in the saddle. It is a phenomenon that is true ‘til today: Ramiro Z stands for show jumpers, while Radetzky stands for dressage horses, but all carry Ramzes and with him Amurath and Bairaktar in their pedigrees. Ramzes was considered one of the most influential sires of the postwar era. 

“Bairaktar”, in Arabian Studs & Stallions.

[My Little Hony]

Abba and I went out for a more directed and purposeful ride this morning, though still a short one. I am being very conservative as I bring her back into work, as I do not want to see her tendons puff up again, and besides, she lost so much weight and muscle that her topline has suffered, and I will not overtax her as she rebuilds the strength she needs to be comfortable under saddle for endurance rides. 

It was a fairly pleasant ride, though at the end, one of the sand mine lorries came up behind us, and though the driver was going slowly, he got too close for comfort, and Abba did not like it, tensing up, inverting and jogging anxiously. A bit later, the same driver managed to separate three young calves from the herd of Angus cattle and kept on going, with the calves running ahead of the lorry in fear, so that is one driver who is probably going to learn you give way to each and every animal on the farm, or you are not welcome back on the property. 

Abba is currently getting two flakes of alfalfa instead of eragrostis, to help her put muscle back on; the two younger mares think this isn’t entirely fair, but the eragrostis is still good, and they do like it, so they don’t push their luck with Abba too often. All three of them today were de-egged once more, and then, glory be, I found the bottle of fly spray that I knew was in the car but had not been able to uncover, and proceeded to spray down not only Abba, Sahara and Shakira, but also the four others they are in with. Horses that were very good and stood to be sprayed got carrots; horses that ran away got carrots if they stopped running. Shakira, being a smart young lady, rapidly worked out that the bottle of fly spray meant treats, and when I grabbed it out of the car to try spray the bot flies out of the air, Shakira arrived promptly and offered herself up to be sprayed again. 

[My Little Hony]

The biting flies are out in force, and Sahara was not thrilled. 

[My Little Hony]

Shakira holding a mouthful of water before swallowing it, a trick she has apparently learned from Abba. 

She was very excited to get out for a hand walk today, and was very jiggy joggy all the way down the gravel road. Uphill, though, was a different matter, and she steadied herself and stuck to a nice calm walk at my shoulder.