THE ARAB HORSE AS HE REALLY IS.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XVI, Issue 959, 23 July 1908, Page 9

THE ARAB HORSE AS HE REALLY IS.

The Arab horse is the maker of desert poetry, as he is the companion of the tents and comrade in war of the Arab himself. Without the Arab horse, Arabia would never have been; with him it doesn’t amount to much, notwithstanding the fact that the Arab horse is—for what he is—a jewel, and particularly is this the case when he is made to be the central figure of a love song and a desert sunset. I am a great admirer of the Arab for what he is, for I spent ten years of my life living with him and mostly on his back, and during those ten years I learned much about him. I learned to admire his boldness, his grand temper, his sagacity, his wonderful —for his size and speed — endurance and bottom, his extraordinary constitutional and physical soundness, the exquisite beauty of his form, the quality and textural fineness of his hair, skin, nervous, bony and muscular structure, his wonderful eyesight and magnificent courage. I admired and loved him for all this. But I found that he could not gallop faster than an ordinary man could kick his hat. I found that he was not fast enough to take to England to play polo; indeed, that he was not even fast enough to compete with the ordinary country breds of India in that great game. I found that in long marches, and particularly forced ones, he had to keep at top speed, so to speak, to maintain his place in the ranks where the walers (Australians) and English horses were taking things easily. I found that when it came to downright want, work and hardship, the flame in his large, soft, brown, but lustrous eyes, went out, and that he drooped and died by the way.

I found, in short, that where he was pitted against thoroughbreds or halfbreds, he was a useless incumbrance, and that his real value and usefulness belonged to the country where he came from and the cilivisation that existed there.

As a hack, he is the very worst. He has the one pace, and that is the gallop; he knows no other, can go no other. He cannot walk a dozen yards on a level road without sticking his toe in the ground, and his trot is the worst imaginable. Over rough ground or in the jungle amongst dry mullahs, holes and hidden dangers, he is the safest transport in the world, and I love him for this. As a cross for breeding purposes history records what he has done. He has stamped himself as the generous giver 4>f all that is good, useful and valuable in the fashionable horse world of to-day, but the potency of his blood only manifested itself many generations after the original cross. First Arab crosses amount to absolutely nothing, and it takes years and years of the most careful selection and breeding to develop the splendid characteristics of which he was the early possessor. In the early crosses he only succeeds in losing his splendid individuality and giving nothing in return. Bred to the biggest, soundest, most perfect specimens of the best families - and gretest stayers of the English thoroughbred mares, he would, perhaps, produce in one hundred and fifty years from now a constitutionally and physically sounder thoroughbred than exists to-day, but this is all he possibly could do, and this only because of

the superior class and quality of the thoroughbred mare of to-day and those of the days of Roxana and Selim.

Some years ago I advocated a cross between the pure Arab pony mare and the small sons of small families of the English thoroughbred, for the purpose of producing a fast, active polo pony with bottom and endurance, and keeping within the height limit (a most difiicult necessity in polo pony breeding) by a further Arab cross through the sire, and finally by careful selection, developing a thoroughbred type of polo pony that I thought would be possible as time went on. English sportsmen, however, working upon a plan of their own, are now producing the most extraordinary thoroughbred ponies the world has ever seen, and which any Arab cross of any kind would only serve to deteriorate.

We have tried the Arab in every possible, every conceivable way. We have given him every chance with every kind of mare, and all we have succeeded in doing is to lose entirely his superb and valuable characteristics and breed a lot of useless wastrels.

The pure Arab blood, the excellent quality of his texture, his wonderful bone and nerve, his magnificent courage and temper, and his extraordinary constitutional and physical soundness, were the priceless assets he instilled into the race horse of to-day. We thank him for them from the bottom of our hearts, we take our hats off to him, and respect him as we always will do. In the fullness of his heart, the Arab horse has given us the very best he has, and we will keep it for ever in unfading remembrance and grateful appreciation. One word for the Arab dealer. Oil and honey, Oriental politeness, courtly Eastern dignity, and to whose voice the music of the nightingale lilting o’er the restful glade and mingling with the bubbling streamlet of the dell amidst the silver moon gleams of the softest night in May, is loud and tempestous; eyes into whose depths you might gaze for ever as they open wide and languidly to receive your fruitless search; the soft touch of the hand, as with gentle pressure he unlocks your very soul and learns all that you fain would hide, he invites you to his tent, offers you his coffee and a seat on his carpet, observes that Allah is Good, and to make a long story short, “ sells you an ’oss.” I shall never forget that delightfully fascinating Arab who sold me a wonderfully good looking “ Guifer,” and called him a child from the heart of the Nejd. I have yet to see the man who has visited Arabia in search of an ’oss who has not been “ stuck,” and stuck good to the tune of “ Are there any more at home like you?”

—A. H. Waddell, in the “Rider and Driver.”