Talk:Al Khamsa

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Don't ALL Arabians have "Bedouin" bloodlines? Isn't the phrase "Bedouin" Arabian rather redundant? After all, the official position of the Arabian Horse Association is that ALL Arabians are descended in every line from the pure lines of the desert. (And yes, I already know the answer, but let's clarify the lines of the debate.<grin>)Montanabw 19:55, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Arabian are descendents of desert-bred horses. Al Khamsa refers to a specific subset of the desert strains. DrL 15:04, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

In all honesty, I find the official Al Khamsa definition a little less than helpful...it sort of says, between the lines, "an Al Khamsa horse is what our organization says it is." I also find the Blue Star and Blue List designations rather hair-splitting. I'm sort of curious -- and maybe this is something appropriate for the article itself when you have time to expand it -- about how Al Khamsa manages to disqualify over 95% of all Arabians registered in the world today...? And frankly, how does the Al Khamsa organization even know that their offically approved horses were all purchased directly from honest Bedouin tribesman and no one snuck in a ringer when the buyer forgot to make them swear by Allah or otherwise swear the official oath or whatever...? I guess what I'm really asking is if the entire obsession with absolute bloodline purity isn't just a little absurd, given that no one could do DNA tests back then anyway and even the "pure" horses could have had mares swap foals, an "impure" stallion breed a mare when no one was looking and any of the many things that happen even in our pedigree-obsessed modern times? Is not phenotype and performance testing a far more useful way to test for a "true" Arabian? Montanabw 19:14, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

All Arabian horses are "true" Arabians. The different bloodlines are interesting to trace (much as family geneology is, and probably about as accurate). IMO, the very "best" Arabians are those that are bred to bring out the best expression of positive characteristics in the bloodlines, whatever they are. (You are preaching to the choir.) Still, I enjoy reading about the "geneology" and "culture" of the different lines. I think it's counter-productive to remove that information from the articles. DrL 19:39, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Without understanding the lore of Arabian nations of that period, you call upon western mentality with your doubts. A pure breed Arabian horse was not a ware to be sold to an infidel. First off, the bloodlines were guarded with extreme zeal. A mare bred by a not-pure-breed stallion was considered tainted, no foal of her (born before or after the 'accident') would be counted as a pure breed. Some would sew vaginas of the mares closed before a battle, to avoid the mare being bred by a horse of 'lesser breed' (european). No pure breed arabian was to be mixed with any other breed, and none was to be sold to infidels, that would be a crime on par with murder or betrayal of faith. So while the 'accidents' you mention aren't entirely impossible, they are far less likely than you believe they are.

Of course, what actually -was- sold to the infidels is an absoltely different matter, and what some american-based equestrian organization calls to be 'pure breed Al Khamsa horses' may just as well be as authentic as all of the 12 meters of St. Mary's veil. But it doesn't mean the classification and characteristics didn't ever apply to real Bedouin horses.

195.150.77.249 (talk) 19:19, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Bloodline stuff

The bottom line is that the Arabian horse article is already a bit too long by Wikipedia's ideals. I mean, thousands of pages are written about bloodlines alone, we just can't explain it properly here. Maybe, if someone has the time later on, it may be worthwhile to break out the bloodline stuff into a completely new article for those who want to delve deeper, leaving the more basic (and fun) stuff for people completely new to Arabians. There already is a separate article on Crabbet Park Stud, and now we have the Al-Khamsa article too. Maybe affectionados could create different articles for the Polish and "Straight Egyptian" stuff. (Or search Wiki to see if this has already been done.) Once that was done, appropriate links could be placed in the main article and the material moved out. Actually, if you want to see how far that article has come, check out the way it looked about a year ago when all it seemed to contain were criticisms of the breed and long discussions about how Arabians were no good...<sigh> Montanabw 20:27, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

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