Between 2011 and 2016, Betty Finke was a regular columnist for The Arabian Magazine. As we enter a new year – and some fifteen years down the line – we thought that now would be a good time to share Betty’s articles, which remain as pertinent as ever.
There is something special about Egyptians.
I saw my first Egyptian Arabian when I was seventeen years old, and I will never forget the day. It was at a big international horse trade fair, and this stallion was stabled in one of the huge exhibition halls. He was a Morafic (Nazeer x Mabrouka) son, almost a carbon copy of his sire. I remember standing there and staring through the iron bars at this incredibly refined, sublimely beautiful creature. Afterwards I went home, sat down, and burst into tears, which sounds a bit silly looking back; but then, I was just seventeen and I had just seen the most beautiful horse in the world.
This was not the first Arabian I had seen; I was well on my way into Arabians at his point. But for a time, this horse turned my world upside down. I slid straight into what I now call my Egyptian phase, or rather, the ‘asil’ phase. I absorbed all the relevant literature from Raswan to the Blue Catalogue and studied the infamous Lineage of Polish Arabian Horses; for some time, I firmly believed that asil, and in particular Egyptian Arabians, were the only proper Arabians, and that Skowronek (Ibrahim x Jaskolka) had terminally contaminated Crabbet Park.
Obviously, my perspectives have changed since then. So, what happened? I grew up. Almost forty years on, I look at this particular phase rather like puberty: it hits you hard, but eventually it goes away.
That doesn’t mean that I am less likely to fall spontaneously in love with a gorgeous Egyptian horse – or any other, for that matter. It also doesn’t mean that I can’t see the point of people breeding straight Egyptians and believing that they are purer than their less privileged cousins. I have read the same books, and I understand it perfectly well. It is easy enough to pick out the blanks in, for example, Polish pedigrees. Interpreting them is another matter entirely, and a subject of its own. The fact is, the blanks are there, and for some breeders this is not acceptable. They want their horses to be ‘pure’ without question, so they turn to those horses where the blanks – which are always there, sooner or later – equal ‘desert bred’. Most of these happen to be straight Egyptians.
This is perfectly all right. Maybe these horses are ‘purer’ – maybe, because we have to take the unquestioned purity of their nameless ancestors largely on faith. How do we know that those desert-bred horses sold by the Bedouins, or brought in by way of the racetracks, were as pure as they were claimed to be? When all is said and done, you can just as little prove the purity of the original desert-bred horses as you can actually prove that the Polish foundation mares weren’t really Arabians. Maybe they were; maybe they weren’t. We can collect evidence, and we can draw conclusions, and we can speculate, but we can’t know for certain.
But does it really matter? Does it have any genuine relevance for the merits of a horse if he has some ancestors 200 years back whose background we don’t know for certain? Does this lessen his quality in any way, or take away any of his abilities? Evidence suggests otherwise. Purists like to draw up long lists of the achievements of ‘asil’ horses; this is fine, but you can draw up equally long lists of the achievements of regular pure-breds. Yes, Egyptians and/or other asils are great athletes; but so are others. Egyptians and/or other asils have excellent dispositions; so have others. Egyptians are supremely typey; nowadays, so are others.
Which, the purists will quickly point out, is due to the influence of Egyptian blood. That is probably true. But the fact that Egyptians have always been exceptionally refined and beautiful probably has less to do with purity than with environment. They are the only group of horses that developed in desert conditions and that were raised on sand rather than green European pastures. We should never forget that the qualities we so admire in Arabians horses were ultimately forged by their environment: the Arabian desert. And while Egypt isn’t quite the Arabian desert, it certainly comes a lot closer than Europe.
I have no problem with anyone who choses to breed straight Egyptians, or who believes that they are ‘asil’. Everyone is entitled to their own preferences and their own beliefs. I do have a problem, though, when all other pure-bred Arabians are claimed to be impure and inferior and even labelled ‘part-bred’. I have a problem when people claim all the essential qualities of the Arabian horse for their bloodline group alone. I have a problem when – as happened last year in Germany – someone comes along and proposes that the Arabian studbook be split in two: one for those who are pure and one those who are not.
Our horses are what they are today, with pedigrees dating back 200 years, and they are called ‘pure-bred Arabians’, wherever they come from. All have blank spots in their pedigrees, of which some say ‘desert-bred’ while some don’t. Anyone is entitled to believe what they want about those blanks. We just have to realise that this is, in the end, a matter of faith. And just like faith on a larger scale, it is perfectly all right to believe – as long as the same right is granted to those who believe differently.
Printed in The Arabian Magazine March 2011
