Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses Westernizing Arabian Horses: Examples of Purity Breeding in Relation to Authenticity and Improvement, 1880–2020 Margaret E. Derry University of Guelph, Canada HUMANIMALIA 13.2 (Spring 2023) Abstract: This article reviews Western approaches to the regulation of Arabian horse breeding as it shifted west and globalized, focusing on the period between 1880 and 2020. The move to “preserve” the Arabian horse within a Western framework is central to this history, but different approaches have been adopted over time. I consider examples from nineteenth century Poland, England, and Russia as contexts for understanding how debates about and approaches to producing “purity” unfolded in the Arabian horse industry in the twentieth-century United States and continue today in the global context of Arabian breeding framed by the Word Arabian Horse Organization (WAHO). Keywords: Arabian horse; breeding; purity; pedigree; Poland; England; Russia; United States; WAHO Bio: Margaret E. Derry is an Adjunct Professor in History at the University of Guelph; Associated Faculty, Campbell Centre for Animal Welfare, Department of Animal and Poultry Science, University of Guelph; and former Associated Scholar, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto. She has published extensively, including six books and many articles on the historical breeding of farm and companion animals. Her most recent book, Made to Order: The Designing of Animals, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2022. “Purity: Its Role in Livestock Breeding and Eugenics, 1880–1920,” is forthcoming in Agricultural History (Nov. 2023). Email: mderry@poplarlane.net Copyright © 2023 Margaret E. Derry This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Humanimalia 13, no. 2 (2023): 85–119. DOI: 10.52537/humanimalia.13792 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13792 Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses | 87 Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) The sound of pounding hoofs in sand could be heard easily. [… The] steeds moved effortlessly across the sand […]. Blacks, bays, chestnuts galloped swiftly with heads held high and hot coats shining in the sun. — Walter Farley, The Black Stallion Returns Since its first publication in 1945, American novelist Walter Far- ley’s The Black Stallion Returns has captivated readers with the fantasy of desert Arabia and its horses.1 Among many of Farley’s admirers in North America the book has stimu- lated a lifelong interest in the Arabian horse and accompanying feel- ings about its assumed uniqueness and perceived exotic heritage. Far- ley’s books appeal especially to young readers, and by the 1980s his earliest fans were in a position to realize the childhood dreams these stories had stirred. Some have become breeders as a result of Farley’s influence, while others have tried to recapture childhood memories by investing in Arabians. Indeed, one breeder claims that Farley con- tributed more to the development of the Arabian over the twentieth century than any other single person.2 Many readers also developed the conviction that antiquity and purity were embedded in this desert horse in a way not true of other equine breeds originating in the West. A dichotomy exists, however, between what Farley wrote about the Black Stallion and what many Arabian horse breeders in Western society have come to believe about Arabian-specific notions of pu- rity. Farley’s imaginary breeder of the Black stallion, the Arab sheik Abu Jaʿ Kub ben Ishak from the El Kharj district in Saudi Arabia, ac- tively introduces foreign blood into his breeding programmes to produce greater speed. Such improvement is achieved, his daugh- ter explains, by abandoning ideas about strict genetic purity where necessary: “My father and his father before him have spent their 1 Farley, The Black Stallion Returns, 100. In what follows I refer to “Arabia” both when discuss- ing the imagined, orientalized East and in historical discussion of eras when the territory was identified as “Arabia” by Western travellers. Where geographical specifics are available they are identified and when referring to more present history I refer to the “Middle East”. 2 Forbis, “Ansata Arabian Stud”, 178; Forbis, “Ansata: The Breeding Program”, 213. 88 | Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) lives interbreeding the original Nejdi purebred strain […] with oth- ers which they have sought for improvement purposes.”3 The sheik enlarges on this point, noting that his horses’ “blood is pure and free of admixture, except in instances when we think that our line will be improved by careful interbreeding with other strains.”4 He concludes by noting that because such breeding practices are commonly fol- lowed in Arab countries very few “pure” Arabians exist there, and “certainly none in any foreign country.”5 Abu Jaʿ Kub ben Ishak’s im- plication that purity and authenticity as ideologies have not been sacrificed through this breeding strategy is central to Farley’s fic- tional representation of the Arabian horse. By the 1980s, however, breeders of Arabians in the West saw the situation differently when assessing real animals. Though they continued to revere Farley’s fic- tional horse, the perceived need to adhere to ideals of purity and au- thenticity to historic type raised critical questions about improve- ment. Was improvement, for example, the antithesis of authenticity because improvement implied change from the original? Could au- thenticity exist without genetic purity? In what follows, I take up questions of this nature by reviewing West- ern approaches to the regulation of Arabian horse breeding as it shifted west and globalized, focusing on the period between 1880 and 2020. The Arabian was popular and influential in the West well before Farley’s time. Indeed, the importation of such animals to Eu- rope through agents from Constantinople and towns in Syria had been underway from at least the late sixteenth century, and Orien- tal bloodstock were central to the creation of many breeds includ- ing, most notably, the English Thoroughbred. By the nineteenth cen- tury, however, a growing focus on the Arabian as a pure breed in itself had taken hold as a result of the expanding preoccupation of Western travellers, explorers, and businessmen with the Near and Middle East. Prior to the Napoleonic campaigns of 1798–99, West- ern interest in Ottoman lands had centred on the desire to estab- lish trade routes and political contacts in North Africa. By the early 3 Farley, The Black Stallion Returns, 112. 4 Farley, The Black Stallion Returns, 115. 5 Farley, The Black Stallion Returns, 116. Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses | 89 Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) nineteenth century, however, the focus was beginning to shift. Con- cern with the topography of the land and its minerals, with its hu- man history (especially that of Egypt), as well as the drive for scien- tific exploration (the river Nile being a prime example) began to focus increased attention on the Middle East. In the mid-nineteenth cen- tury, Britain and France developed political and commercial aspira- tions for greater control of this territory, particularly Egypt (and the building of the Suez Canal, for example). Mapping and exploration became critical for Western penetration of this territory, in turn en- couraging further exploration and ultimately tourism. Railway build- ing amplified the sense of European presence, and Turkey itself (the centre of the Ottoman Empire), Syria, and Iran (Persia) all attracted significant European attention. Ottoman and Arabic cultures and customs offered what western newcomers increasingly defined as a sense of exoticism: painters and writers, for example, took the ex- otic East as their subject in greater numbers over the late nineteenth century.6 Europeans often felt a sense of decay pervaded countries under Ottoman control, moreover, making many Western visitors come to believe it was their duty to rescue and preserve its treasures. The move to “preserve” the Arabian horse within a Western frame- work, keeping it pure rather than using it to upgrade European horses, was part of this Orientalist trend in Western thought. After the mid-nineteenth century, European travellers began to penetrate the interiors of Syria in greater numbers in search of Bedouin-bred Arabian horses. By the late nineteenth century more adventurous visitors began extensive trips into central (now Saudi) Arabia with the same thought in mind. In Europe, importers developed two dif- ferent strategies to breeding these horses, both designed to main- tain the Arabian in its new environment. Establishing Arabians as a Breed in the West: Importing Stallions to Breed Local Mares in Poland. The most important examples of the earliest method of breeding Arabians outside the Middle East rested on breeding up to intensified 6 For example, see Stevens, The Orientalists, 15–18. 90 | Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) Arabian blood by mating imported Arabian stallions with local mares. The system developed primarily in Poland where, for centu- ries, princely stud owners had coveted and collected Arabian horses. Historically, many of these studs could be found on what was known as the “black road”, the main route taken by Tartar and Turk inva- sions up to 1750.7 Around 1570, Polish princes began the practice of capturing cavalry stallions during invasions and mating them to lo- cal mares. The breeding of “Arabians” as such was not central and selection strategies beyond this simple formula were random and haphazard. Over time, however, the Poles came to believe that cross- ing Eastern males into the national herd led to an improvement in Polish horses. As Prince Roman Sanguszko wrote in 1876, describ- ing the state of his family’s stud at the end of the previous century: the herds of great landowners of the times were often mixed and led without any thought. The only saving grace was that from the older times, as a consequence of the Turkish and Tar- tar attacks, the hero families of our countries defending it [sic], […] they had the opportunity to acquire original eastern and Arab horses through the wars, and from them, the better blood and the higher oriental race spread throughout the country.8 As relations with Turkey stabilized and the wars ended in the early nineteenth century, the acquisition of Eastern stallions became more difficult. Landowners in Poland interested in intensifying the “Arabian” qualities of their animals, started to send agents to Con- stantinople and centres in Syria, like Aleppo, to purchase stallions. As the century advanced, Polish breeders relied less on their own agents and more on horse dealers from Constantinople or Aleppo to supply breeding stock. The Poles usually made no effort to under- stand where the horses they imported originated or who their breed- ers were, and reliance on the judgement of agents/dealers for selec- tion was the common practice — though an important exception 7 W. S. Blunt, My Diaries, 219 (13 September 1895). 8 Sanguszko, Sr. “Prince Sanguszko’s Stud Farm”. For this and all subsequent documents downloaded from skowronek.io: This website was constructed by Lyman Doyle and was also attached to the blog Daughters of the Wind until shortly before December 2022. The site is currently down but can be accessed via the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine. http://skowronek.io Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses | 91 Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) was Count Wacław Rzewuski, who had come to know and admire Bedouins as a result of his travels through Syria and imported more than one hundred animals when he returned to Poland.9 As Polish breeders began to focus on improving the horses in their studs, they adopted more structured breeding programmes utilizing newly pur- chased stallions. After generations of constant breeding with Ara- bian stallions, the resulting horses carried a greater concentration of Arabian blood.10 In effect, they became “Arabians”. The history of the Sanguszko family stud in Sławuta (established in 1791 to work in concert with another family stud founded in the six- teenth century) illustrates many of the patterns described above. Prior to 1800, the Sanguszko herd had been a nondescript group of horses which resulted from random breeding involving some Ara- bian blood.11 When the end of several wars resulted in a shortage of raided stallions, between 1800 and 1803 the Sanguszko family be- gan to follow the standard practice of purchasing stallions in the Ottoman Empire and despatched the nobleman Kajetan Burski to Constantinople in search of horses. Finding nothing of interest there, Burski proceeded to Aleppo and thence into the interior of Syria (a practice virtually unheard of at that time) on various buying expedi- tions. By the late nineteenth century, though, the Sanguszko family had come to rely on horse dealers in Ottoman lands and followed the common custom of purchasing stallions rather than mares. The historic propensity of Polish breeders to have little knowledge of where horses originated or how the Arab people bred continued as well. In 1900, Prince Roman Sanguszko Jr., nephew of the elder Prince Roman and the Sanguszko family member then in charge of the Arabian horse operation at Sławuta, admitted that he knew next to nothing about how breeding proceeded in Arab countries: “I can- not judge about strains, the species, divisions and branches of the desert Arabian horse […] I have never travelled to Arabia,” he sug- gests, adding that “whether the nomadic Bedouins will disappear in the less or more distant future, under the influence of European 9 Archer et al., Crabbet Arabian Stud, 18. 10 Ott, “Skowronek Type”, 103; Taverna, “Comet”, 84. 11 Sanguszko, “Prince Sanguszko’s Stud Farm”. 92 | Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) culture, […] it is difficult for me to judge.” Sanguszko did, however, believe in the value of the Arabian horse and saw “saving” the breed as his mission: “the Arabian horse deserves to be preserved, there is no doubt about that.” He further argued that his horses had attained a degree of excellence while maintaining authenticity and so “com- pletely preserved the type of the desert Arabian horse.”12 The Sanguszko interaction with Arabians became more complicated when the Sławuta operation split into two sections, a division initi- ated by the marriage of Maria Sanguszko to a member of the Potocki family. Many of the Sławuta animals became part of Potocki holdings as a result of this split, and in 1881 they would form the foundation of a new stud, Antoniny, established by Józef Potocki (Maria’s son).13 The affairs of the family studs — Sławuta and Antoniny — remained closely linked and private breeding records existed for these inter- connected family operations. The basis of both studs, then, rested on bred-up animals with records linking them to the breeding prac- tices of the late eighteenth century. It should be noted that it was not always clear whether the stallions acquired by the Poles, either in raids against the Ottomans or via agents sent to Constantinople and Aleppo, were in fact Arabians. Sanguszko, for example, spoke of “eastern” or “oriental” horses as opposed to “Arabians” being obtained by the princely studs. Many equine types passed through the general area and had commonly been traded in towns like Aleppo. In other words, it is likely that some animals brought to Arabian studs in central Europe belonged to other breeds. This situation appears to be the case in the breed- ing and importing work of the Branicki family whose stud, Uzin, was founded around 1780. In 1895, Wilfrid S. Blunt, an English visitor and important commentator on Arabian affairs in the west, noted that: The history of the stud, of which I have looked over the books, seems to begin authentically in 1813, though [it is said to have] forty years or more of antiquity. It can hardly be called a pure 12 Sanguszko, Jr., “Letter”. The letter was published in Shcherbatov and Stroganov’s Book of the Arabian Horse [Книга объ арабской лошади], pp. 158–64. 13 Parkinson, “Skowronek”, 119. Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses | 93 Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) Arab stud, as the stallions then imported stand entered as Turk, Turkoman, Anatolian, Persian, Arab, and even in 1828 English, while the mares are equally mixed. It is clear that they have run too much after size; and at Uzin the type nearly lost. […] The mares are far inferior in looks to the Sanguscko mares, hav- ing coarse heads, long backs, and long legs. They carry their tails, however, generally well. One cannot avoid the conviction about them that they are of mixed origin. I only saw one mare […] one would have supposed to be an Arab. They are breeding now largely from an English thoroughbred, which gives more saleable stock.14 Establishing Arabians as a Breed in the West: Importing Mares and Stallions for Breeding in England The second approach to “preserving” Arabians en route to creat- ing what would become the modern Arabian breed, involved hav- ing considerable knowledge of Arab culture and breeding method- ology: knowing exactly where the best horses were bred, undergoing difficult travels to reach them, and subsequently importing mares and stallions with little reliance on town agents. The intent was to produce Arabians with no admixture of local European stock and to do so on the basis of personal research. The approach was initi- ated in 1877 by Wilfrid and Lady Anne Blunt when they founded the Crabbet Arabian Stud in England. The Blunts learned to write and speak Arabic, and after communicating with Arab breeders soon un- derstood certain principles that were commonly held by desert Bed- ouins throughout Arab countries. Namely, that young foals should be deprived of water for their first few days of life to test foal stam- ina in the environment; that seasons dictated when to breed and which animals should be bred more than any outward appreciation of quality in an individual. Bedouins believed in telegony—the idea that if a mare carried a foal by an undesirable stallion (usually sim- ply meaning one owned by a foreign tribe), all her future foals sired by different stallions would be tainted. Because only mares that had never been covered by the wrong horse were considered to be of the 14 W. S. Blunt, My Diaries, 223–24 (20 September 1895). 94 | Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) highest quality, the family of such mares would easily become asso- ciated with quality; by inference, if a mare was clean she was also pure. Conversely, foals born from the wrong crossing, as with their dams, became valueless for breeding purposes and therefore were viewed as being of low quality.15 (Clearly at least some tenets of envi- ronmental breeding, which had dominated European approaches up until the late eighteenth century, also played a role in Arab strategies.) The Bedouin breeders also kept track of their mares by categorizing them within “strains”, thereby defining the family line to which any in- dividual horse belonged via the strain relation of mares, not stallions. After reviewing reports made by Western travellers, the Blunts de- cided that the major Bedouin breeding area was bordered by Nejd in the south and the Syrian Desert in the north.16 Nejd itself, they felt, was the most significant centre of quality horse breeding. Taken in their entirety, the 1879 diaries of Lady Anne suggest that while the Blunts recognized that Bedouins produced good stock in parts of Syria, Iran and Iraq, the couple believed that the greatest historical horse-breeding tribes of Nejd were in present-day Saudi Arabia. It was here, then, that they concentrated the search for mares and stal- lions, although they did travel through Syria and other countries in search of potential stock. The Blunts also established an operation in Egypt, Sheykh Obeyd, to breed stock and to house horses that later would be sent to their Crabbet stud in England.17 Authentic documentation from breeders’ private records remained as important to the Blunts as good quality. They went to great lengths to ensure that documentation was as correct as possible and quickly learned to avoid horse-trading agents. From the begin- ning, moreover, the Blunts were interested in maintaining the au- thenticity of the original Arabian horse rather than breeding for im- provement. The couple bred to perpetuate horses defined as “pure”, or asil, meaning they traced authentically on all sides to Bedouin breeding. If aims of improvement did not guide Crabbet breeding 15 Edwards, “To Progress… or Regress”, 13–14. 16 Archer et al., Crabbet Arabian Stud, 16; Blunt-Lytton, Authentic Arabian Horse, 160. 17 See Upton, Desert Heritage, 20, 36, 68, 80, 88. Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses | 95 Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) plans, however, the Blunts diligently watched for any degeneration in quality. Culling was important to ensure the continuation of au- thentic quality, as Wilfrid noted in 1904: “To maintain the stud its highest perfection, all individuals should be weeded out of it every year which fail to come up to a certain standard of physical form.”18 Knowledgeable as they were about the traditional culture surround- ing the Arabian, the Blunts chose not to strain breed their Arabi- ans. Instead, they devised a way to keep track of the lines from which they were breeding based on tail female descent. Thus, for example, any horse, mare or stallion, with a name starting with R descended on its dam’s side from the desert-bred mare Rodania,19 while any horse that descended from the desert-bred mare Dajania on the dam’s side had a name that started with N, for Nefisa, Daja- nia’s daughter. Despite this method of record-keeping, Western at- titudes to the relative importance of mares to stallions continued to underpin their breeding program. The production of good stallions was the object of the stud, and mares were evaluated according to their ability to produce them. “It is better [that good mare lines] should be lost when after three generations they have failed to pro- duce a sire of the first class”, Wilfrid opined, since only certain mare lines produce “colts worthy of being used as sires.”20 Lady Anne planned to write a book about the background and his- tory of Arabian breeding based on her extensive first-hand knowl- edge. She died in 1917 before completing the project, however, leav- ing an incomplete manuscript, which was published in 1944 by her daughter, Lady Wentworth, in her book The Authentic Arabian. Lady Anne was particularly interested in how the myths and stories sur- rounding the antiquity of the breed developed. She outlined the way the culture concerning the beginnings of the Arabian had evolved over the years, particularly in Nejd. The original outlook about ori- gin derived from word-of-mouth attitudes that developed in what she called the “inner circle”, the area in central Saudi Arabia known 18 W. S. Blunt, quoted in Archer et al., Crabbet Arabian Stud, 225. 19 Edwards, “Remember the Mare”, 27. 20 W. S. Blunt, quoted in Archer et al., Crabbet Arabian Stud, 225–6. 96 | Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) as the plateau of Nejd. According to Nejd tradition, wild horses had been caught and tamed “in the primitive days of old”. The wild ones subsequently died out, but the tamed horses received no special treatment to ensure that animals “kept [their] pure wild type un- changed”. Lady Anne believed that Islamic religion introduced new ideas about where the Arabian came from — ideas based, as far as she was concerned, on fable. These ideas were particularly strong in the towns or oases, places traditionally looked down on by the de- sert Bedouins who thought their compatriots had been corrupted. “Thus,” Lady Anne suggested, “a new body of tradition was got to- gether of a mixed if not altogether spurious kind,” but one which more accurately should be called “Mohammedan” rather than Ara- bic. The Moslem version, she argued, “has been repeated by every subsequent writer on Arabian matters until it has become almost impossible to distinguish what is of value in it and what worthless.”21 As far as Lady Anne was concerned, the Moslem version not only coloured, but also formed the basis of, Western travellers’ views (or what she described as a third vision of the Arabian’s past) because these people rarely ventured into remote parts of the desert.22 Lady Anne believed, then, there were three separate cultures regarding the Arabian; the original Nejd one (the most authentic), the broader town interpretation highly coloured by Moslem culture and common in Arab countries, and the Western view which was largely based on and similar to the generalized Arabic town attitude. The Blunts were aware of and interested in the princely studs exist- ing in Poland, and over the years between the 1880s and roughly 1910 often visited them. The couple appreciated the work of the Polish princes and the relative antiquity of the establishments (compared to their own) devoted to breeding Arabians. Lady Anne admired the animals that conformed to authentic type at Antoniny, for example, but concerns about their lack of purity held the Blunts back from purchasing any stock. For Lady Anne, quality and even authentic- ity to type could not overcome their lack of purity. After visiting the stud in 1884, she wrote: 21 A. Blunt, quoted in Blunt-Lytton, Authentic Arabian Horse, 86, 87, 89–92. 22 A. Blunt, quoted in Blunt-Lytton, Authentic Arabian Horse, 134, 135, 140–3, 148. Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses | 97 Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) I should very much like to have something from this stud if we could find a pure one for sale. […] I wished I could have made a picture of the herd of mares grazing on the edge of the oak forest. It was a lovely sight — for looking at them in that way one could not see the flaws of descent […] In looking over the Stud Book, I found that hardly any one of the mares but has a cross in her pedigree — it would therefore be absurd to us to buy an- ything now; perhaps later on if one of the finest were for sale one might buy her as a specimen, but a colt from any of these would not be valid for breeding.23 Westernizing the Desert Arabian: The Establishment of Pedigree Registry The establishment of a stud in England quickly triggered the desire to standardize the Arabian along the English system of purebred breed- ing — a move that, in the end, would “westernize” the Arabian as an established breed. Evaluation and monetary worth, first in Britain and subsequently in international circles, rested on an animal being defined as “purebred” (having a pedigree generated by a public reg- istry rather than an owner-breeder pedigree). For their model, the Blunts turned to the only public registry for horses at the time, the General Stud Book (GSB), which was run and operated by the Weath- erby family since the late eighteenth century. The GSB generated ped- igrees for the English Thoroughbred and held the power both to qual- ify animals for entry in the racing industry and to include or exclude new entries. The GSB provided the model for the registry of papered racehorses in other countries as well and had become the stand- ard used by Jockey Clubs in France, the United States, and Australia. The Weatherby family sympathized with the Blunts’ cause because of the historically close relationship of the Arabian to the Thorough- bred and James Weatherby agreed to open a special section of the GSB for Arabians in 1877, thereby identifying the Arabian as a breed.24 Pedigrees involving standard genealogy would carry no strain 23 A. Blunt, “Personal Journals”. 24 Archer et al., Crabbet Arabian Stud, 170. 98 | Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) information other than a reference to foundation animals as “de- sert bred”. Any registered horse could, if bred to a registered horse, have future progeny entered in the book. Root documentation gave evidence of purity in foundation animals, making correct informa- tion important for acceptance by the registry. However, the correct- ness of what had been used to identify “purity” became both unim- portant and superfluous once entry into the stud book had been achieved. Authenticity to purity was thus guaranteed by the pres- tige associated with GSB pedigrees. As had been the case with the Thoroughbred, Weatherby planned to generate a pool of animals from which all future stock would be bred so that at some point the book would be closed to outside entries. The GSB model almost immediately created difficulties for breed- ers dispersed across diverse geographies and traditions. Arabians in continental Europe held only pedigrees generated by the breeder and no central public way of collecting pedigrees existed. Many of the significant horses bred as Arabians in Europe originated in Po- land, and these animals carried pedigrees emanating from the stud books of various princely breeders which clearly indicated the bred-up status of the animals. The situation, it seemed to some, should be addressed: in 1900, several Russian breeders began to consider how to address the difference between the importing sys- tems of the Polish princes and that of the Blunts. Documenting “pu- rity” via public records (not just through breeder records), they ar- gued, could distinguish animals that might look like Arabians but were not pure, from those that were in fact pure from a desert back- ground. Increasingly aware of the Crabbet stud but relying heavily on Polish Arabians (which tended to be produced in what was Russian Poland), the Russians similarly began to believe that a public regis- try system ought to be developed in Russia. Arabian horse breeding was not new to Russia in 1900. The Russian Imperial family and aristocracy had been using both Arabians and Turkomans for horse breeding for centuries. In 1778, Count Alexei Or- lov founded a stud based on gifts from the sultan of Turkey; from these stallions, he would develop the Orlov Trotter by crossing them Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses | 99 Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) on local mares.25 Stud records for all Russian operations were pri- vately kept at this time, as was the case in Poland. More studs devel- oped over the nineteenth century. Prompted by interest in the Near and Middle East and its culture, Prince Alexander Grigorievich Shcher- batov and his brother-in-law Count Sergei Alexandrovich Stroganov established an Arabian stud and in 1889 travelled to Syria in search of pure mares and stallions. In 1900, they published The Book of the Arabian Horse (Книга объ арабской лошади, translated into English as The Arabian Horse: A Survey in 1989) in which they discussed purity and Bedouin strains. Shcherbatov used his imports for crossbreed- ing or upgrading local animals, but from the beginning Stroganov wanted to preserve the Arabian in its pure state and by 1899 there were sixty-six horses of one hundred per cent Arabian background in his operation. The following year, he bought an imported Arabian mare from Wilfrid Blunt at a horse show in France for 10,000 francs.26 Shcherbatov and Stroganov devised a strategy for organizing a Rus- sian public stud book based on two separate sections, one for pure Arabians and one for bred-up Arabians. They then presented their proposal to the Imperial government. Before authorizing it, the Main Managing Department of State Horse Breeding of Russia decided to investigate the matter and sent a questionnaire to Prince Roman Sanguszko Jr., then the primary breeder in Poland. Sanguszko re- sponded that he thought it undesirable to separate “non-pure” an- imals from a list comprised of horses that were one hundred per cent Arabian in a stud book. While his animals did not descend on all lines from desert-bred imports, he noted that they were as good or better in quality than those that did. Improvement as much as au- thenticity had always been important to Polish breeders, and San- guszko indicated his belief that purity was not an issue of authen- ticity or improvement: The [newly proposed Russian] Stud book, in my opinion, should comprise only one section of Arabian horses, without differ- entiating between pureblood [one hundred per cent Arabian] 25 Greely, Arabian Exodus, 170. 26 W. S. Blunt, My Diaries, 458 (7 September 1900). 100 | Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) and purebred [with less than one hundred but more than fifty per cent]. Horses that originated exclusively from pure Arabi- an ancestors, i.e. not having even one drop of any other blood, besides the Arabian, and horses of the famous Arabian horse breeding farms in Russia [most Polish studs were in Polish Rus- sia] which have at least ⅔ or 66% of pure Arabian blood, should be included in this book, and their pedigree must be proven.27 In its final deliberations, the Imperial government also addressed the Blunt method, characterizing it as follows: In general, it should be admitted that before Mr. W. Blunt, who founded his farm at Crabbet Park (England) in 1878, pureblood Arabian horse breeding in Europe did not exist. This is because the Arab Bedouins’ horse breeding was not studied enough at the time, and under the name of Arabian horses the European farms were accepting all kinds of horses purchased in the East, as soon as they had a distinctive type.28 Commenting on the Arabian situation in Europe, the Russian gov- ernment set out how the purity/authenticity ethos appeared to be opposed to the improvement ethos under Western standards, us- ing the Crabbet stud as an example. The Blunts’ intention, the re- port noted, was to “exclude all horses that don’t fit into Arabian type, whatever the other individual qualities are, since the goal of the Stud is not to improve the composition, according to European concepts, but to preserve the Arabian horse in a state it existed in since an- cient times in its homeland.”29 Despite Sanguszko’s reservations, the Russian stud book was es- tablished in 1903 with separate pure and bred-up sections. With the Russian revolution, however, the stud book collapsed as did the breeding operations of the two Russians who had proposed it. Shcherbatov died in 1915, and Stroganov (who died in 1923) fled to Paris. None of the horses belonging to either of these breeders 27 Sanguszko, Jr., “Letter”. 28 “Stud Book of Arabian Horses”. For the original Russian, see https://vivaldi.nlr.ru/ bv000070233/view/?#page=22. 29 “Stud Book of Arabian Horses”. https://vivaldi.nlr.ru/bv000070233/view/?#page=22 https://vivaldi.nlr.ru/bv000070233/view/?#page=22 Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses | 101 Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) survived and when the Russian government re-established a horse breeding centre, Tersk, at Stroganov’s estate in 1921 it was with en- tirely new breeding stock. Initially, Tersk focused on local crossbred types but shifted in 1926 to being a purebred Arabian breeding oper- ation. None of Stroganov’s lines were part of the new stud. Instead, horses acquired by Tersk often came from Polish animals of San- guszko background or English animals based on the same lines. A newly established Russian registry book that pedigreed these ani- mals had only a purebred section. Before the collapse of the 1903 Russian stud book, the prototype of a public registry which would endure across Europe (Russia in- cluded) and ultimately globally, was founded in 1908 in the United States. The new American stud book separated the Arabian horse from the parallel Thoroughbred registry associated with the GSB by establishing a national registry devoted specifically to the Ara- bian. This stud book entrenched the pattern of maintaining only a purebred section: there was no section for bred-up animals and no pathway for admission to purebred status based on breed- ing up to an accepted percentage. The American registry evolved from events that began in 1906, the year in which Homer Daven- port brought back a group of Arabians from Syria along with a Bedouin groom. Davenport did not have what was deemed to be accurate documentation of their “desert” breeding and had failed to take the horses through England to acquire pedigrees from the GSB. These omissions meant that in the United States no registry would accept them because the Jockey Club did not register for- eign animals without GSB papers. The situation was made worse by new American legislation. In 1906, the Bureau of Animal Indus- try, the arbiter of what qualified as a purebred animal because of the United States Department of Agriculture’s role in tariff regula- tions set out by the Treasury Department, demanded registration in American books was necessary to obtain purebred status. To provide his horses with pedigrees, Davenport decided to establish a new registry for Arabian horses in 1908.30 30 “Breeders of the Northeast”, 143–4; Craver, “Davenport Arabian Horses”, 1–5. 102 | Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) The resulting organization, the Arabian Horse Club of America, Inc. (renamed several times, before finally settling on the Arabian Horse Registry of America, Inc., or AHRA, in 1969) set up rules to define the eligibility status for entry into the registry. Centrally, it established both that no breeding-up would be recognized in horses accorded purebred status, and that all horses entered had to have documen- tation establishing descent entirely from horses bred in the desert. Davenport’s Arabians were grandfathered in, but future imports would be accepted as purebred only if their purity could be authen- ticated with proper documentation. Entry requirements to the AHRA fell into two separate sections, both guided by the mission state- ment to preserve desert purity. The first was the “non-discretion- ary” group, which required no documentation and automatically accepted applicants as pure. In 1908 this group included Arabian horses from the Jockey Club stud books of Britain, France, Australia, and the United States. In the future, horses emanating from other sources would be admitted on a “discretionary” basis and would re- quire supporting documentation to establish their purity. AHRA di- rectors were given the power to accept or reject such documenta- tion, effectively making them gatekeepers of purebred status. The problem of bred-up Arabians (those never defined as entirely de- scended from the desert) becoming part of the American system and later the world system was not solved by this new strategy for assessing “purity” and therefore authenticity. Furthermore, the new way of assessing purity brought with it the capacity for individuals to serve their own interests because of their power to regulate, es- pecially when it came to importing. The Heyday of the Western Trade in Arabians under the GSB and AHRA, 1920–1960. The centre of the Arabian horse world in the West between 1920 and 1960 was the Crabbet stud in England, whose trade with breeders in the United States shaped ideologies of purebred breeding to a considerable extent. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Crabbet operation passed into the hands of Wilfrid and Anne Blunt’s daughter, Judith Blunt Lytton (later Lady Wentworth). Following her Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses | 103 Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) parents’ practice, Wentworth did not breed by strain; however, she did work to improve the original type. When some accused her of di- verging from authentic style, she responded that “if being ‘off-type’ means having higher withers, longer rein and curve of neck, stronger and broader quarters and better hocks, together with freer hock ac- tion, then I am proud to say that I have deliberately bred for these points and shall continue to do so.”31 Wentworth’s breeding philos- ophy of improving from foundation stock dovetailed both with the dominant approaches to Arabian horse breeding in Europe and North America at the time, and with views about the role authen- ticity should play in breeding decisions. Until mid-century it was gen- erally accepted that animals could be both true to authentic style and improved, an outlook not unlike that articulated by Farley in The Black Stallion Returns (1945). Registry systems played a significant, but perhaps more importantly, hidden role in the establishment of this position, which in the end equated authenticity with purity. (Far- ley paid little attention to the impact of registries, perhaps because their influence was not publicly apparent at the time he wrote his books.) The fact that Wentworth worked within the accepted regis- try systems — the GSB and the AHRA — meant that neither the purity nor authenticity of her stock would be questioned. Wentworth utilized the desert Blunt lines at Crabbet and to some de- gree relied on the research carried out by her mother, Lady Anne Blunt, but her most important innovation would be the introduction and widespread use of the Polish stallion Skowronek, who had been im- ported to England in 1913 by an American.32 Skowronek was bred by Count Potocki at the Antoniny Stud in Poland and foaled in 1908. To pedigree the horse in the General Stud Book, Wentworth obtained pa- pers verifying the horse’s background from the breeder’s son, Józef Potocki, Jr. This horse would be the last foundation animal to be ped- igreed by the GSB as the book was subsequently closed to new un- registered stock. Potocki reported from his family records that Skow- ronek’s sire, Ibrahim, had been brought to Poland in 1907 by Count 31 Reese, The Kellogg Arabians, 43. 32 The Authentic Arabian Horse provides a detailed description of Wentworth’s views on breeding, strains, and authenticity in the true Arabian. 104 | Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) Józef Potocki Sr., having been purchased in Odessa through an agent who had acquired the horse in the “Orient”. The animal was docu- mented as sired by Heifer, out of Lafitte.33 Skowronek’s dam, Jaskolka, had been bred in Poland from Polish stock. While virtually nothing more could be discovered about Skowronek’s sire’s background, his dam was another matter. In this, Potocki had been less than complete in providing information about Jaskolka to the GSB in 1919. To begin with, it is clear from the 1903 Russian stud book that the mare came from a bred-up background. Part One of the book cov- ered all horses that had descended entirely from animals imported from the best breeding tribes in Arab countries, and Part Two set out all horses of largely Arabian blood whose pedigrees contained some non-Arabian ancestors. No horse owned by the Potocki family gained entry to Part One and Jaskolka was listed in Part Two.34 Real evidence also exists to show that she did not qualify for Part One: a history of the Sanguszko family stud written in 1876 and published in the United States in the 1960s notes that all Potocki imports of Arabians before 1818–19 had been stallions. Purebred mares did not come into the Arabian breeding herd until later and thus horses that traced to the pre-1819 Sanguszko stud records (like Jaskolka) could not be described as purebred.35 Despite this issue, the registration of Skowronek in the GSB ensured that any lack of purity in his back- ground would not impact the marketing of his progeny internation- ally. Wentworth’s “authentic” Arabians bred after 1920 resulted pre- dominantly from the cross of Skowronek on the old Blunt imported lines, and by 1960 Skowronek had created by far the greatest sire line of Arabians in the United States.36 Changes in Poland after 1920 raised another issue that would be ongoing: the relationship of a foreign government-regulated public stud other than the GSB with the AHRA. The situation that evolved in Poland challenged the non-discretionary views of the AHRA and 33 Edwards, “Great Strain Robbery, pt. 2”, 22. 34 See evidence in the “Stud Book of Arabian Horses”. 35 WAHO, “Is Purity the Issue?” See also “Prince Sanguszko’s Stud Farm”. 36 Edwards, “Skowronek… Three to One”, 26–28. Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses | 105 Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) in doing so exposed the difficulty of maintaining “purity” on the ev- idence of foreign registries. Built on the remnants of the princely studs shattered by the First World War, a new public registry under the Polish government’s minister of agriculture was established in 1926 on the model of and complying with the procedures of the pure- bred system.37 Breeding centres subsequently emerged with surviv- ing horses from the old private studs serving as foundation stock for these new operations.38 It would be argued that the Poles deliber- ately concentrated on the continued use of old Polish lines which had emanated from quality breeders.39 Since the Poles had always bred for what they deemed improvement as much as for authentic- ity to type, no re-start based on one hundred per cent purity was planned. Impressed by the athletic ability of Polish-bred horses (as well as noting that Skowronek had been bred in Poland), American directors of the AHRA became interested in importing Polish horses. To avoid the difficulties of these horses being on the discretionary list, in 1937 they placed the Polish book in the non-discretionary section, thereby allowing the registration of Polish horses in the US without questions about their background. Admittance through the non-discretionary section meant that historically bred-up animals would be defined as one hundred per cent pure, thus serving the personal interest of the directors responsible for the decision. Purity/Authenticity Concerns under Registry Definitions, 1950–1970. Despite the ubiquity of Skowronek genetics in American Arabians and a rising interest in imported Polish horses, many breeders in the US after 1960 began to question whether Western registry systems had actually preserved the purity of the desert horse. Underpinning 37 Wilfrid Blunt described the situation for the Sanguzsko family in his diary: “Slavuta and its stud have acquired a tragic notoriety […], having been the scene of one of those hide- ous outrages which distinguished the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Prince Sanguscko, the owner of the stud, was in his country house at Slavuta, when a number of disbanded sol- diers recently returned from the Russian army broke into his house and took him out of it and brutally ill-treated him, killing him at last with their bayonets and then pillaging the château and destroying the whole of his Arabian stud.” My Diaries, 221 (14 September 1895). 38 Lindsay, “Arabian Breeding”, 26. 39 Marston, “Blue Influence”, 131. 106 | Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) this shift were Carl Raswan’s ideas concerning the loss of Bedouin breeding techniques articulated in his books and horse index. Ras- wan, whose original name was Carl Reinhardt Schmidt, travelled ex- tensively in Syria during the years around the First World War. Born in Germany in 1893, he became an American citizen in 1927 and changed his name to that of his favourite Arabian stallion (ironically not a prod- uct of pure Bedouin stock but rather a son of Skowronek, bred by Lady Wentworth). Passionate about Arabian horses, Raswan believed that Arabian horse breeding in the West had moved away from Arabic roots and culture, thereby resulting in a breed that was not authen- tic. Purity to what he believed were Arab ways became Raswan’s ob- session. Acting as an agent, he returned to Syria a number of times in the 1920s and early thirties and became acquainted with both town and Bedouin Arabs. Long after his travels, he wrote about breeding techniques of the Arab people while living in the United States (and later Mexico). Raswan died in 1966 but his ideas about breeding, more than any animal he either bred or imported, endured. In attempting to reintroduce authenticity to Western breeding, Ras- wan focused on the strain system. For him, strains and culture were at the heart of Bedouin breeding and therefore required for authen- ticity. Breeding by strain had never taken hold in the West and the dominance of breeding that openly avoided purity — such as that found in Skowronek’s background, for example — represented the ultimate in degradation of the Arabian horse to Raswan. Indeed, “Western” concerns with quality, improvement, and even beauty played no part in Raswan’s theories. Despite this, and intriguingly, Raswan’s correspondence with W. K. Kellogg in 1926 expressed over- powering appreciation for Skowronek: Skowronek is [a] pure white Arab stallion. He has never had a rival, won all championship and is undefeatable and not in all history is known to have another Arab existed of his type out- side Arabia. He is the most beautiful which I ever saw and has a spiritual to his physical which is beyond description […]. He seems to be of an unearthly creation.40 40 Raswan to W. K. Kellogg, 4 February, 1926, quoted in Parkinson, Romance, 52. Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses | 107 Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) The horse also seemed to evoke nostalgia for Raswan’s days of free- dom in the desert away from the problems of the West, and this way of life as much as the Arabian animal itself seemed to inform his pas- sionate belief in the need for breeding reform. According to Raswan, the Arabian horse had been created within three overarching strains (all with numerous sub-strains) associated with three distinct physical types: the Saklawi (refined, elegant, and feminine), the Kuhaylan (powerful, bold, and masculine), and the Mu- niqi (with a racier build and usually with the forequarters more devel- oped than the hindquarters).41 Raswan believed both that the Arabs had practised strain breeding and also inbreeding and that Western breeders should do their best to return the modern Arabian to the authentic trueness of type found in the three strains. For Raswan, this could be accomplished by undertaking a number of steps. First, by breeding away from the Muniqi strain, which he claimed was im- pure because of one Bedouin cross with a Turkoman stallion in the seventeenth century (a pure or asil Arabian had no Muniqi blood). Raswan stated that Europeans had in the past favoured Muniqis be- cause of their racing ability, and that this preference had stimulated their production for the European market. Among Bedouins, how- ever, Muniqi strains were avoided.42 Second, by placing primary em- phasis on female lines, as had been the case in Arab countries. Ras- wan thus advised dropping the Western obsession with stallions. Third, by expecting intensification of the basic family strain charac- teristics when horses are bred to produce concentration within a strain, especially where both parents follow the same strain pattern in tail female. And finally, by inbreeding whenever possible.43 One fol- lower of the Raswan system stated that “the challenge of […] breed- ing has not been in the production of good horses because this has resulted from the automatic biological processes.”44 41 Forbis, The Classic Arabian Horse, 254, 275. These names can all be spelled in a variety of ways: e.g. Seglawi, Saqlawi; Keheilan, Kehilan; Mannakey, Maneghi. 42 “Raswan”, Arabiana, 148; Ott, “Arabian Types and Strains”, 142, 145, 152; Craver, “Daven- port Arabians at Craver Farms”, 10–11; Edwards, “Letter”, 15. 43 Craver, “Davenport Arabians at Craver Farms”, 10. 44 Craver, “Davenport Arabians at Craver Farms”, 11. 108 | Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) Throughout the 1960s, Americans Kathleen Ott and her daughter Jane actively took up Raswan’s fight to return to “authentic” breed- ing practices. Kathleen Ott wrote extensively about the need to re- turn to strain breeding and Jane Ott organized a plan for preserving true Arabians on a percentage basis. Known as the Blue Star system, Jane Ott’s “Blue Star” designation applied to horses that descended on all sides to roots with no Muniqi blood. “Blue list” animals traced to these roots as well, but with one to fifty per cent breeding of Mu- niqi. All other Arabians were assigned to a “general list”.45 Studs oper- ating under the Blue Star system began to practice inbreeding within strains to preserve true (non Muniqi) type. Breeders claimed that per- petuating type defined the highest quality and that any attempts at improvement—including for beauty—meant degradation. Jane Ott also addressed the issue of Muniqi and/or Turkoman influence. To begin with, she believed Turkoman blood was common in horses bought by agents in Syria despite claims that these animals were pure Arabians.46 She explained the advent of Muniqi in Arabians as follows: The Muniqiyat strains represent the only known case in which a Bedouin tribe permitted an alien stallion to serve an Arabian mare. The 17th century Salqa Bedouins allowed a cross of Tur- coman (already a grade-Arabian stock) into their Muniqi strain. This produced an increase in size and sprint-speed, with a loss of compactness and refinement. The new Muniqi eventually spread through most if not all the old Muniqi, and, in the course of three centuries, has infiltrated seven of the other nineteen strains. […] The Bedouins valued the Muniqiyat strains, […] but never accepted them as “asil” […]. Foreigners, on the other hand, usually fell head over heels for the Muniqi at first sight and preferred it to every other strain, possibly because of its resemblance to the English Thoroughbred, a breed which the Muniqiyat Arabians played a principal part in founding.47 There was a strong reaction by establishment breeders against the Raswan and Ott theories. These breeders not only relied heavily 45 Ott, “Arabian Types and Strains”, 142, 145, 152; “Blue Star Arabians”, 133–35. 46 Ott, “The Sub-List Basilisks”, 95. 47 Ott, “Grant and Huntington Importations”, 139, 141. Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses | 109 Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) on Skowronek genetics, but also believed in striving for superior type — particularly better structured legs — while maintaining the head and neck characteristics so desirable in Arabians. Gladys Brown Edwards, a renowned expert on the history and breeding of Arabi- ans who worked for the W. K. Kellogg Arabian breeding centre in Cali- fornia during the 1930s and early forties, became a major spokesper- son for the status quo, which included recognition for the breeding quality of Skowronek. Edwards rejected theories that disfavoured improvement breeding, abandoned ideals of beauty, and excluded Skowronek lines. She labelled the new style of authenticity-driven breeders the “Anties” because they were opposed to any Arabian not derived from or duplicating (as they defined it) methods of pure Bedouin breeding. An “Anti” bomb had been “dropped on Poland”, Edwards suggested, “resulting in a blackout of all Polish bloodlines as far as the Anties’ conception of ‘purity’ was concerned. The target, of course, was Skowronek.”48 She also noted the implication that in the American registry pedigreed half-breeds were regarded as pure. In her response to “Anti-ism” Edwards agreed with the Polish stud book’s founder Edward Skorkowski that “One would be crazy to deny the purity of Skowronek’s blood, the horse of the CENTURY.”49 Through the early 1960s, Edwards led the crusade against what she saw as the Raswan anti-improvement movement. In “To Pro- gress...Or Regress That Is the Question”, Edwards asked readers of The Arab Horse Journal to consider whether “your horse descended from certain celebrated individuals or has it ascended from them?” Edwards further argued that “to scrap such benefit and regress into yesteryear does not seem in accord with American initiative and progress.”50 Improvement breeding and the systems designed to bring about improvement had, as far as she was concerned, clearly replaced the antiquated thinking and methods that dominated in Europe until the late eighteenth century. The refinement found in Skowronek’s offspring was central to her objection to Raswan’s the- ory concerning the Muniqi strain: 48 Edwards, “Great Strain Robbery, pt. 1”, 23. 49 Edwards, “Great Strain Robbery, pt. 1”, 29. 50 Edwards, “To Progress... Or Regress”, 12–16. 110 | Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) The [Muniqi] is no more “angular” than is any other strain. […] At any rate, the [Muniqi] was no more “impure” than any oth- er, and Rawsan’s vague story about one obscure tribe crossing with “Turcoman stallions” (he first said one, then kept adding to them — himself — not the tribe — though on paper of course [)] — and pow!  — automatically all [Muniqi] horses in Arabia be- came contaminated!51 The Continued Entrenchment of the Western Registry System. Breeding under the Western pedigree system with its unclear atti- tude to “purity” remained in place despite the undercurrents of a desire to re-instate an emphasis on the horse as a product of Ara- bic culture. The Arabian horse industry in the West exploded after 1970 following the American acceptance of many new European na- tional registries.52 The influence of Raswan and strain theory, how- ever, continued to influence the breed via the rise of what might be called artificial Western “strains” over the late 1970s and early 1980s, including so-called straight Russian Arabians (basically horses of Egyptian, Polish and Crabbet breeding). Polish horses continued to command attention and their breeding mushroomed after the stal- lion Bask was imported to America in 1963. American demand for Polish horses expanded to include animals bred in Holland, Brit- ain, and Germany and the hot market was stoked by the structure of the American tax system, which offered tax advantages to inves- tors in the horse industry. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 changed the situation by introducing the idea of passive and active investment. Subsequently, tax advantages would be significantly reduced for those who owned horses as a passive investor or through passive activity (an investment partnership).53 As tax shelters for people in- vesting in Arabians in the United States disappeared, the Arabian 51 Edwards, “Letter”, 15. 52 For more detail on the Western Arabian horse industry, see Derry, Bred for Perfection; Horses in Society; and Made to Order. 53 Email to the author from PricewaterhouseCoopers, about American taxes, 18 January, 2000. For a detailed review of how the tax act affected horse owners, see Geske, “Tax Tips”, 132, 129. Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses | 111 Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) horse industry was dramatically reshaped. With this reduction in American demand, a collapse of the hot global market for Arabian horses followed. When the dust from this downturn settled in the 1990s, the Arabian horse industry revived but its character was changed significantly. It now reflected a more fully globalized market involving many countries in the Middle East as well as traditional centres like Europe and North America. In part, this resulted from the unifying power of the World Arabian Horse Organization (WAHO), founded in 1967. WAHO would come to act as an umbrella organization for world trade, but it did so under Western registry conditions. As Christoph Lange explains: With WAHO came a new definition of the Arabian horse, which did for the Arabian breed in the twentieth century what the British General Stud Book did for the Thoroughbred in the eighteenth century: it consolidated the Arabian’s status as a global breed, established a blueprint for closed stud books, and placed control of its registry in the hands of a small but powerful group of Euro-American private breeders. Perhaps most influentially, WAHO introduced a new breeding definition embedded in a transnational bureaucratic infrastructure. The political consequences of this shift produced a regulative re- gime of inclusion and exclusion focusing on pedigree and ques- tions of breed purity.54 From the beginning, WAHO defined purity through the mechanics of the Western purebred system by imposing regulations for public re- cording. Most crucially, registries of countries joining WAHO were re- quired to conform to WAHO’s rules for pedigree standards. As early as 1972, however, it became apparent that streamlining the world’s registries would not be a straightforward process. This was immedi- ately evident in Spain, where the Spanish Civil War had disrupted fa- mous studs — most importantly that of the Duke of Veragua — result- ing not in the loss of the horses, but rather in the loss of pedigrees. Everyone knew the surviving horses were purebred Arabians (many were descendants of Crabbet horses with Skowronek bloodlines), 54 Lange, “Making and Remaking”, 239. 112 | Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) but no one could be sure of the correct sires and dams.55 The prob- lem of validating Spanish pedigrees was solved when WAHO mem- bers agreed to recognize the Spanish horses descending from the Duke of Veragua’s stud simply as “Veragua”. The Veragua issue demonstrated that if concerns over purity were not resolved the international market would not function smoothly. It was therefore important to reach a transnational agreement about how to define a pure Arabian. WAHO set up a committee that spent considerable time working on the problem of defining purity. At the 1974 WAHO meeting in Malmö, Sweden, members ratified the pro- posed definition put forward by the committee, which stated that “a purebred Arabian horse is one which appeared in any purebred Arabian Stud Book or Registry listed by WAHO as acceptable.”56 De- spite the Malmö agreement, however, disputes about the purity of contentious horses, and therefore the pedigrees of animals ema- nating from them, continued to fracture the international market. In the 1990s, for example, a dispute over the stallion Kurdo III brought the purity (and hence the marketability) of many South American horses into question. WAHO itself became divided over the issue, a situation that threatened the stability of various national registries. Despite these setbacks, the power of WAHO continued to grow and it effectively became the titular head and governing body of the global Arabian horse world. Today, the only recognized “pure Ara- bians” in the world are those accepted by WAHO since horses with pedigrees from national stud books rejected by WAHO are excluded from the global Arabian community. The national registries consol- idated under WAHO thus form a closed circle that has been defined by anthropologists as “kula”: an idea used to describe not only the exclusive closed nature of a breeding circle, but also the complex dy- namics of ritualization and commodification common to the group.57 In effect, WAHO exists as a marketing cartel with cultural overtones. Membership comprises an elite and closed body of breeders who function in a sealed-off world that isolates non-members from the 55 “Spanish Arabian Stud Book”, 237, 240, 241. 56 “1974 WAHO Conference”, 18. 57 Lange, “Global Arabian Horse Kula”. See also Ziegler, “Kula Ring”, 39–60. Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses | 113 Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) economics, culture, and breeding operations within its specialized society. Within the WAHO, the Western system of defining purity has prevailed.58 However, the desire for closer allegiance to Bedouin tra- ditions involving strain breeding and assessment of purity on that basis has not necessarily been incompatible with the overarching Western system, and therefore has not vanished among Arabian breeders in various parts of the world. It is particularly noteworthy that Raswan’s passionate and even ro- mantic vision has continued to inspire breeders even if few now im- plement his theories. In a conversation on an internet forum in 2010, for example, Lebanese breeder Edouard Al-Dahdah noted that he ad- mires Raswan’s passionate vision, despite his belief that “Raswan’s monumental body of work (his Index) is cryptic, garbled, ambigu- ous, incoherent, confusing and downright contradictory. It gener- ally complicates rather than clarifies.”59 Replies to this comment sug- gested general agreement but most posters also expressed deep admiration for the man and his ideals. One noted that “Raswan raised awareness for preservation of the Authentic Arabian Horse, at a time when people just bred one Arabian to another […]. Whether you agree or disagree with Rawsan’s theories, whether you think he was a charlatan or a hero is not as important as his overall general message calling for the preservation of the Asil.” It could thus be ar- gued that the main significance of Rawsan’s influence rests on his reintroduction of the importance of Arab thinking and culture to de- bate about the authenticity of the Arabian. Five different groups de- voted to preserving both purity and Bedouin theory in the breeding of Arabians still exist today: the Blue Catalog, the Pyramid Society, Al Khamsa, and the Asil Club. A group of international breeders who support the dream of preserving Bedouin standards within the West- ern registry system issued a Manifesto in 2022 outlining what made an Arabian pure to its past.60 58 For more on the WAHO and its effects on Middle Eastern countries, see Lange, “Decolo- nizing the Arabian Horse”. 59 On Carl Raswan as a reliable source of scholarly information on Arabian horses see Edouard Al-Dahdah’s blog Daughters of the Wind: https://daughterofthewind.org/. 60 See: https://arabianhorsemanifesto.org/. https://daughterofthewind.org/ https://arabianhorsemanifesto.org/ 114 | Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) Modern Genetics and the Purity / Authenticity Myth. By now it should be apparent that the “Turkoman”, an Oriental horse found in many Ottoman lands often in conjunction with Arabians, lurks behind much of this story — and particularly the period covering the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The exact location where the two breeds might have simultaneously existed in the Middle East re- mains unclear, but both types could be found in Europe as early as the sixteenth century. Whether an imported horse was an Arabian or a Turkoman has historically been difficult to determine. The founding stallions of the Thoroughbred breed, for example, were often referred to as “Turks” but at the same time were said to be Arabians. It even appears that sometimes “Turk” was a synonym for Arabian. The re- cords of Polish princes who presided over early Arabian studs show ev- idence of imported “Turkomans”, and in the 1890s, Wilfrid Blunt won- dered if these “Turkomans” were in reality Arabians. Raswan spoke of Turkoman crosses on particular Arabians, and Jane Ott believed many of the horses sold by agents in Syrian towns were in fact Turkomans. This breed of Oriental horse was developed in the desert north of Ara- bia in the steppes of Central Asia. Long bodied, slender, tough, and fast, the type was favoured both in the Ottoman Empire and Europe.61 In 1813, for example, John M. Kinneir reported that in Persia it was common to cross Turkomans on Arabians.62 European wars with the Ottomans often resulted in the importation of Turkoman horses for the cavalry. The Turkoman is believed to be extinct today but with a close liv- ing relative, the Akhal-Teke. Recent genomic work confirms the va- lidity of arguments that Turkoman genetics are central to breeds such as the Thoroughbred. As Donna Landry points out, “the resem- blance, even today, between the English horse [Thoroughbred] and the Turkoman — in the form of the modern Akhal-Teke — is so striking, and so in contrast to the relative lack of resemblance between the English horse and the purebred Arabian […] that it appears the Tur- kic contribution has been hidden in plain sight.”63 Among the more 61 See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkoman_horse. 62 Landry, “Disappearance of the Turk”, 41. 63 Landry, “Disappearance of the Turk”, 38. about:blank Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses | 115 Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) important findings related to DNA studies of Turkoman genetics is that our understanding of the lineage of the three founding stallions of the Thoroughbred breed — the Darley Arabian (the most signifi- cant), the Godolphin Barb, and the Byerly Turk — were all Turkomans by male descent.64 Turkoman stallions were thus clearly being used extensively to improve horses in Europe, making it attractive for breeders in the Middle East to cross Turkomans on Arabians to pro- duce stock for export to Europe. Jane Ott suggests as much, and Lady Anne Blunt infers the same. How frequently the Turkoman was interbred with the Arabian is not known, but the potentiality raises interesting questions related to the antiquity of Arabian purity. Modern genomics has also done much to illuminate the Arabian’s past revealing, for example, information about genetic diversity and the modern pursuit of purity in Arabians. It seems evident that the broad diversity evident in the DNA of Polish Arabians, especially in re- lation to low diversity levels in other North American and European Arabians, resulted from the long history of upgrading local stock with stallions among early Polish breeders. The greatest genetic di- versity in Arabians, however, can be found in Middle Eastern coun- tries, indicating that the movement of horses to the West initiated a trend towards diversity loss. Generations of inbreeding in the an- imals originally imported to the West and strict emphasis on the centrality of imported genetics to ideologies of purity have there- fore come at a cost for breeders outside the Middle East. If further DNA studies link the Turkoman more closely to the past of the Ara- bian, such information could undermine the focus on purity that has led to decreased genetic diversity in the modern Arabian breed. Given the tenacity of myths surrounding purity and strain differen- tiation, it will be interesting to see how new DNA studies will impact engrained cultural ideas. 64 The overview of DNA and genomics in relation to the Arabian presented here is based on the following: Khanshour et al., “Microsatellite Analysis”; Almarzook et al., “Diversity of Mi- tochondrial DNA”; Almarzook et al., “Genetic Diversity”; Wallner et al., “Y Chromosome Un- covers”; Hudson, “Whole-Loop Mitochondrial DNA-D loop”; Sadeghi et al., “Genetic Diver- sity”; Cosgrove et al., “Genome Diversity”; Machmoun et al., “Genetic Diversity”; Sargious et al., “Genetic Diversity”; Sargious at al., “Genetic Diversity”; Remer et al., “Y-Chromosome Insights”; Felkel et al., “The Horse Y Chromosome”; Michaelis, “Analysis of Arabian Stallion”. 116 | Derry, Westernizing Arabian Horses Humanimalia 13.2 (2023) A Few Concluding Remarks The confusion arising from trying to fuse notions of Western “purity” with reconstructed historical views of Arabic “purity” has made the history of the Arabian tumultuous, and in the end has given rise to an East–West hybrid in the regulation of the Arabian horse industry on a global stage — though nationally there continues to be a deviation towards one form or the other. The difference between global and national trends, and between WAHO-identified breeders and those whose stock is excluded from WAHO’s closed books, might in the end reduce the power of WAHO to control definitions of purity or au- thenticity in the name of marketability. Genomic information could also play a role in undermining the foundations of organizations like WAHO. There are currently deep feelings of bitterness about pedi- gree issues, believed lack of purity, and the excessive power of cer- tain breeders within the framework of WAHO-enforced culture.65 The economic basis of contemporary breeding culture rooted in West- ern privileging of certain forms of pedigree keeping stands to erode if its perceived value undergoes a transformation. Under these con- ditions, Walter Farley’s fictional rendering of attitudes to purity, au- thenticity, and improvement in the Middle East seems surprisingly prophetic. 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