Craver Farms
Rt 2 Box 262
Winchester, Il 62694
217-742-3415
Readers who
enjoy English literature can take pleasure in Wordsworth's
poem telling how he, too, found restrictions of
his own choice a source of freedom.
Nuns
fret not at their convent's narrow room;
And hermits are contented
with their cells;
And
students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver
at his loom,
Sit
blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak
of Furness-fells,
Will
murmer by the hour in foxglove bells;
In truth, the prison, unto
which we doom
Ourselves,
no prison is; and hence for me,
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime
to be bound
Within
the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for
such there needs must be)
Who
have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace
there, as I have found.
William
Wordsworth, 1806
Our favorite poem about Arabian
horse breeding was written in 1806 by William Wordsworth.
Maybe he never saw an Arabian horse, but he wrote a
sonnet which is very pertinent for many of today's breeders
of Arabian horses and particularly for the people who
are interested in this little group of Arabian horses
which are called Davenports.
Wordsworth chose the sonnet form for
this poem. The sonnet is one of the most rigorous forms of poetry
in the English language. Much can be said in a sonnet, but what
makes a sonnet a sonnet is that everything must be stated in
14 lines of rhymed iambic pentameter. No more. No less. Nothing
else will do.
Wordsworth's sonnet begins "Nuns fret
not at their convent's narrow room . . ." He goes on to
tell of other people who choose restricted lives yet feel no
confinement because their choices are voluntary. Then he expresses
his contentment at the restrictions of the sonnet form in poetry.
There was a time when most Arabian horses
were owned for very utilitarian purposes. The Arabs had them
go on raids, and, when horses ceased to be useful for that purpose,
most Bedouin owners no longer kept them. Although the horses
are a heritage to us from such hands, they are usually not objects
of utility in our lives. In large part, our interest in them
is aesthetic.
Where we keep and breed these animals
for beauty, we are not so different from William Wordsworth,
who was seeking beauty, too; In the strict lines of the sonnet,
he found freedom of expression. In the strict lines of Arabian
horses, we, too, find freedom to express the loveliness of these
horses.
Horsemen who breed Davenport horses as
a field of activity have chosen one of the most restricted of
all Arabian breeding groups in overall scope. Far from being
a handicap, since 1955, these restrictions have helped bring
this group from a little nucleus of about 15 horses to their
present number (in 1988) of about 500 breeding individuals.
In spite of this growth in numbers, Davenport horses are still
a rarity and an endangered species in the Arabian horse kingdom.
More important than their rarity is that these five hundred
horses are successful individuals which fit into a number of
vigorous, distinct breeding programs within the large Davenport
context. Each one of these has a very good prospect of going
on and being successful in its own right or alternatively of
combining with parallel Davenport breeding groups in an effort
to bring the good features of each group together in one horse.
Davenport breeding started in 1906 with
the 24 *** horses which are registered by the Arabian Horse
Registry as imported from Arabia by a man named Homer Davenport.
Of these, 20 appear in the pedigrees of current registered Arabian
horses. However, only 15 (*Haleb,*Muson, *Hamrah, *Wadduda,
*Gomusa, *Deyr, *Reshan, *Abeyah, *Urfah, *Werdi, *Farha, *Hadba,
*Jedah, *Haffia, *Abbeian) are represented in pedigrees which
do not also trace to something else. By custom, the living horses
tracing to these 15 horses and no others are called "Davenport"
Arabians.
Obviously, any breeding group of Arabian
horses tracing to only 15 ancestors who lived in 1906 is pretty
restricted to begin with. As Arabian breeding developed in this
country, the restriction was further tightened because usually
little systematic effort was made to keep Davenport bloodlines
intact as a breeding group. Many nice Davenport horses were
bred, but these horses were so successful in outcross breeding
that they tended not to be bred to each other except almost
as a matter of accident. By 1955, after having been in this
country for 49 years and having produced literally thousands
of descendants, there were only about 25 horses left which were
Davenport in background without having crosses to some other
kind of Arabian breeding.
In most respects, the pedigrees of these
horses were very similar. They traced to about the same imported
animals. There were close relationships in shared parents and
grandparents. Four were full brothers and sisters, and several
had half-sibling relationships. The general consensus among
knowledgeable Arabian breeders was that the bloodline was too
scant as to numbers and too inbred to still be a successful
long-term breeding group.
Yet there was so much that was attractive
about the horses. They had such fine skin, such big eyes, such
a human orientation in attitude. Taking the descriptions of
the horses of Arabia as the old writers had written about them,
these were obviously the same kind of horse that people had
gone to Arabia to buy in the first place: a moderate-sized,
athletic, beautiful horse that still looked like the pictures
of the horses that came from Arabia.
Furthermore, these were horses of a wonderful
history. Their ancestors had been brought from Arabia in an
extraordinary importation that was possible only because of
joint support by the President of the United States and the
Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. They had been in this country
almost since the beginning of Arabian breeding here. They had
contributed to the pedigrees of most of the finest horses in
American Arabian breeding, and they had produced famous individual
horses that everyone knew and admired: horses like
Hanad, Antez, and Letan. It seemed that this was a kind
of horse that somehow should be permitted to survive.
In those days, nobody talked about such
things as "investors" or "marketing." there wasn't a national
show, and most states didn't even have state Arabian organizations.
People just got horses they liked and began, without worrying
too much about the future.
That's the way renewal began with the
Davenport's. In 1955 a program was started at
Craver Farms, Hillview, Illinois,
with the purchase of
Tripoli (Hanad/Poka).
Before purchase, he had fallen on hard times, but, when his
ability to sire foals became apparent, Davenport mares were
purchased to breed to him.
It was not possible to just go out and
buy mares like that in a lump. First they had to be identified
as alive through careful study of the stud books and current
Arabian literature. Then they were traced to ownership through
the Registry or other sources. Finally, owners would be contacted
for purchase. Prices were not great because horses did not cost
much in those days, and these were mostly mares that were older.
It was not always easy to achieve a purchase. Sometimes it was
not possible. Nevertheless over the years mares were acquired,
and the few remaining stallions became available to add to what
had begun with Tripoli. Eventually, 16 horses were utilized
to form a "second foundation" of Davenport breeding.
A number of owners took part in this
effort. There was very little competition as to who would purchase
or work with a given mare or stallion. The whole venture would
have been impossible if there has not been a general attitude
among breeders of cooperation
and friendliness in working towards the goal of preserving
the Davenport Arabian horse. This attitude has persisted over
the years, to the great advantage of Davenport bloodlines.
When Davenport breeding began in 1955,
there was no long-range plan for how it should be conducted.
Only one stallion was available, and he was bred to the mares.
What a thrill it was when the noted scholar of Arabian breeding,
Carl Raswan, solicited the picture
of one of the earliest foals (Alaska, foaled in 1958; she was
actually the second produced, and is still living) to be run
under the heading, "Lest we forget,
the authentic, the pure Arabian," in conjunction with all-time
greats of the breed: *Nasr, *Ibn Mahruss, Mahroussa, and Mesaoud.
Success such as this was thought to be enough of an achievement
in strict breeding in itself, but in time it became clear that
there was a much larger issue involved with the Davenports than
the production of a few individuals of unique breeding. The
real problem was how this group of horses should be saved on
a long term basis: What would be the best way to breed these
few, inter-related individuals so as to preserve the maximum
number of their good qualities without adding other blood?
This is a similar problem to that faced
by breeders of any endangered genetic group of animals. We frequently
hear of it in conjunction with salvage breeding programs at
zoological institutions, where the effort is made to preserve
breeding groups of rare wild animals. Siberian tigers, California
condors, Alpine goats, Peregrine falcons, giant pandas, and
cheetahs are examples of animals where such breeding programs
are in place. In the horse world, a major effort is being made
to preserve the Przewalski horse. Many of these threatened breeding
groups have the resources of the international zoological community
working on their behalf plus the further advantage of starting
from a broader genetic base than the tiny group of 16 with which
the Davenports started in 1955 or from what they have now at
about 500 individuals of breeding potential.
As Davenport breeders saw it, there were
two possible ways of managing the remaining Davenport horses
for long-term survival. The first was to systematically breed
them for maximum hybrid vigor. This called for keeping inbreeding
levels as low as possible and working towards long-range pedigrees
where foundation and intermediate foundation animals tended
to be in balance. That is apparently the approach taken at most
zoological institutions. there is no question that it can be
successful, but it has the disadvantage that the "blend" of
bloodlines it produces may cause desirable individual features
of foundation animals to be lost through dilution or inadvertent
adverse selection. If it had been followed with the Davenports
in 1955, practically all living Davenports would now be grey,
muscular Kuhaylan types
with pricked ears and great vitality. They would be fine
horses but would represent only a fraction of the genetic potential
of Davenport bloodlines.
The way of management which was instead
chosen was to divide the foundation breeding group along lines
of difference which existed between its individuals to produce
even smaller breeding groups. Priority was then given to breeding
within these groups. This added major new restrictions to how
Davenport horses would be bred but it had the advantage of allowing
individual traits of animals and types within each group to
have maximum opportunity for expression. This way the danger
that such traits would be diluted away or covered up would be
minimized. Actually, there was little long-term danger to the
approach chosen. As long as the animals were bred, their blood
would be preserved according to either plan. If the need arose,
the groups could always be merged, at a future time. But with
the advantage that their best characteristics would have been
enhanced by selection.
Initially, the surviving Davenports were
divided along the oldest concept in Arabian pedigrees. This
was the concept of family strain. Some of the earliest records
of Arabian pedigrees show that the Bedouins of Arabia divided
their purebred horses into different families. The names of
these families come to us almost unchanged literally over hundreds
of years of records. Prominent among these are "Kuhaylan," "Saqlawi,"
"Abayyan," "Hadban," and "Mu'niqi." Family names are transmitted
on the tail-female side of a pedigree, so that a daughter is
of the same strain as her mother. According to the classic writers
such as Lady Anne
Blunt and Carl Raswan, all
"asil" or purebred Arabians in Arabia had family names. Sometimes
these designations have been lost as the horses came from Arabia
into countries with stud books, but such names where known are
still shown in some stud books, although not in those of the
Arabian Horse Registry after Vol IV, 1937, and its supplements.
Opinion is divided as to how much the
family or strain name of an Arabian horse means. Modern pedigrees
are so long and complex that, for most Arabian horses, strain
designations may not mean much. The Davenports, however, were
still very close to the desert both as to generations of descent
and physical appearance in them that correlated with their family
strains. Accordingly, they were separated into a Kuhaylan group
and a Saqlawi group, and, where other practical considerations
of breeding did not interfere, Kuhaylan were mostly bred to
Kuhaylan and Saqlawi primarily to Saqlawi. Previously this had
bend done from time to time with good results, but not systematically.
The result was very interesting. It turned
out that the Kuhaylan Davenports began to be more uniform with
every generation of breeding within the Kuhaylan strain and
to look more like what authorities had written of as the classic
prototype of the Kuhaylan Arabian horse. The same thing happened
with the Saqlawi: they became more and more uniform and more
and more like the standards of that strain. The changes were
not merely apparent in one or two individuals but obvious enough
so that almost any informed visitor to the pasture of Davenports
could identify many of them by strain.
After the initial division into Kuhaylan
and Saqlawi breeding groups had proven to be a success, a further
division of the Kuhaylan group was made according to "substrain."
In Arabia, the "substrain" of a horse was an integral part of
the identification. It served to identify the specific branch
within a major strain to which a horse belonged. There were
two substrains present among the Davenports of the Kuhaylan
strain, deriving from the original imported individuals. These
substrains of the Kuhaylan were the Haifi (written Kuhaylan-Haifi)
and the Kurush (written Kuhaylan-Kurush). The division of the
Davenport Kuhaylans into these two groups turned out to be very
successful with excellent individuals being produced within
each group. There was no question that both groups were of overall
Kuhaylan type, but also none that they were different from each
other and able to breed on as separate families of horses.
A final division as to strain among Davenport horses
has been made in recent years when the tail-female descendants
of a mare named *Hadba of the 1906 importation have been bred
to each other on strain principles. *Hadba was of the Hadban-Inzihi
strain. It appears that a group of Davenports of this strain
is now being put together even after all the years and generations
since the importation. Davenport breeding is the stronger for
it.
At present division of Davenport horses
along strain lines approximately as follows: 60 percent Kuhaylan-Haifi,
14 percent Kuhaylan-Kurush, 22 percent Saqlawi-Jidran, and 4
percent Hadban-Inzihi. Where the
total number of Davenport breeding individuals is in the neighborhood
of 500, it will be seen that the actual numbers of horses involved
in the major strains is considerable. A further point of interest
is that in the Davenports the practice of breeding so that strains
of sire and dam are similar is long standing. Some Davenport
pedigrees show three and four generations where all individuals
are of the same stain. Pedigrees of this sort nearly always
result in animals which are an excellent demonstration of the
powerful effect of strain breeding in the Arabian horse.
Even as strain breeding was becoming established for
Davenport horses, it became apparent that there were other differences
of pedigree in the breeding stock which also should be separated
out. Some of these differences seemed small. In the Kuhaylan-Haifi
group there was a difference in animals according to whether
they traced to a mare named Fasal.
Fasal was a famous mare. She was of similar breeding to a number
of the other early Davenports but a breeding group could be
set up according to whether or not she was in pedigrees. Horses
not tracing to Fasal were identified as "non-Fasals." They were
neither better nor worse than other Davenports, but they seemed
a little different. This has been a difficult group to maintain.
It has included some of the most successful Davenport horses
in re-establishing Davenport breeding and continuing it, but
there were several years when not enough replacement fillies
were produced along with the stud colts. In recent years the
deficiency has been corrected, and the group now has excellent
prospects, although it numbers only about 4 percent of living
Davenports.
Similarly, a breeding group was established
according to whether the stallion
Tripoli was present
in a pedigree. Tripoli has been the most prominent stallion
of Davenport breeding beginning in 1955. He had the rare gift
as a sire of being successful with mares of the whole range
of Davenport breeding. As a result, his blood is extremely strong
in almost all Davenport horses. There were a few from which
it was absent, however, and from these it was possible to set
up a breeding group under the name "non-Tripoli." This is a
group which crosses strain lines: some in it are Kuhaylan, some
are Saqlawi. Two stallions of this group, Ibn Alamein and Regency
CF, are among the most influential of currently living Davenport
stallions. Ultimately, the non-Tripoli group may be of special
value as an outcross for the Tripoli influence. It makes up
5.5 percent of living Davenports.
Other divisions of Davenport breeding
stock also exist on a quiet basis, and they are maintained with
a minimum of public attention. Among these are a group based
on the absence of the blood of the mare Dharebah, divisions
within the large Saqlawi breeding group in which the lines to
Antan, Maedae, Kamil
Ibn Salan and Antarah are separated from each other. Other
groups are developing according to whether they concentrate
the blood of the mares Dhalana, Ceres,
Dharebah or Tyrebah.
A type of division which has hardly been
approached is to set up breeding groups based on the individuality
of horses. It would be very practical to orient Davenport breeding
programs towards certain goals in type: the dish face, color,
the "Hanad"
type carriage of body, markedly pricked ears-these and others
are characteristics about which breeding can be organized with
excellent results. They have all been done successfully. It
only remains to connect them with breeders who have the room
and resources to develop them. The rewards to such breeders
are great: To adopt one of these projects is an opportunity
to do one's own thing, while still taking part in a larger,
worthwhile movement in Arabian breeding.
The reward for Davenport breeding is
great, too, because each one of these successful and somewhat
separate breeding efforts adds strength to the overall bloodline.
Something all groups have in common is that they come from very
similar parent stock. They trace to almost all the same desert
bred ancestry, usually through the same horses that were prominent
in Davenport breeding through the 1940's. A definite harmony
exists between the inheritance and appearance of these groups.
With many of them, it is possible to interbreed with benefit
while still maintaining their parameters. For instance, both
the Saqlawi and Kuhaylan groups have been strengthened by occasional
use of stallions of the other strain.
Ultimately, along with continuation of
the major divisions of Davenport breeding into breeding groups,
a final process of synthesis will probably occur in which the
various groups are brought together. At the point, breeders
may find that additional groupings of Davenport horses are emerging
which build on the successes of the older ones. We are likely
to see horses in which almost all of the foundation horses of
1906 and 1955 are blended but in which some aspects of the blend
are preferred by some breeders, other aspects by other breeders.
Arabian horse breeders would not be human if they did not start
with these variations to make something new and their very own.
The potential for new, creative subdivision is always present.
As long as there are new breeders with a love for the beauty
and heritage of this type of horse, there is no logical limit
to its continuing development. The source of foundation Davenport
blood is reliable and self-renewing.
That is the freedom that comes from the
restrictions in Davenport breeding. This little group of horses
tracing to only 15 in 1906 and 15 in 1955 has been subdivided
and subdivided along increasingly narrow lines of breeding.
Of course, the process has not always been easy, but the result
is that the numbers and excellence of horses has grown and at
the same time the number of people supporting them has grown.
Far from being a limit of activity, the restrictions have been
a source of success. A choice which Davenport breeders constantly
enjoy is as to which of the alternative restrictions they should
choose in order to make their horses still more what they want,
still more successful.
There is only one caution, which applies
to other Arabian breeding as it does to the Davenports: the
dividing of breeding group into its component parts for separate
development of each is a powerful tool for the breeder. Where
it has not been used properly, it has historically caused major
harmful results, with the actual destruction of some bloodlines
and the creation of whole breeding groups which are apart from
the best standards of historical Arabian breeding. It is essential
that this method of breeding be used in conjunction with effective
selection of individuals according to realistic, historical
standards for Arabian type. Considerations of size, proportion,
soundness, conformation, disposition, a dn type remain extremely
important. The pedigree cannot be successfully separated from
the horse.
***footnote: The '24' accounts for the
horses which actually arrived in 1906. In addition, three were
imported in-utero, one of which (*Moharra - no get) was shown
as imported and two of which (Saleefy and Meleky - both having
important lines in Davenport breeding) were not.
