Windt im Wald Farm
Geauga County, Northeast
Ohio
since 1995
STRAINED RELATIONS
Copyright by
MICHAEL BOWLING
used by permission of Michael Bowling
"Strain"
is defined courtesy of Messrs. Funk & Wagnalls as follows:
Line of
descent or the individuals collectively in that line; race;
stock; also, a variety, especially when artificial and but slightly
differentiated.
Inborn or hereditary
disposition; natural tendency; trace; an element or admixture;
as, to have an heroic strain in one's character.
A special line
of individuals belonging to a certain race or species and maintained
at a high standard of perfection by selection; said of animals
or plants.
There are further
definitions which do not relate to our animal breeding context.
The
standard text, "Genetics and Animal Breeding" (Johanssen and Rendel,
Stockholm 1963; English translation 1968) has this to say: "Very
often a breed can be divided into different strains which from a
breeding point of view are more or less isolated from each other
due to geographic conditions or when in some respects the aim of
breeding is different."
An
amazing amount of confusion has been generated on the Arabian scene
by the fact that Bedouin breeding has been described in terms of
"family strains" when no two speakers seem to have defined "strain"
in quite the same sense. For that matter, "Bedouin" seems to have
been used in a number of senses and it is not surprising that contradictions
have arisen. "The horse breeding tribes" are not and as far as we
can tell have never been a monolithic entity with entirely uniform
horses or ideas on horse breeding. Since different travelers spoke
with different tribes, different ideas as to the importance of the
"family strain" concept and totally different ideas as to what the
"strains" were like and which were more important or desirable have
come down to us.
The only real certainty out of it all seems
to be the fact that the Arabian horse was bred in the desert with
attention to tail-female descent (this is all "family strain" in
the Arabian breeding sense is; it is the eastern equivalent
of the Western idea of placing emphasis in breeding on the tail-male
line).
When the Bedouin Said "Strain",
What Did the Europeans Hear?
Before considering what the implications of
emphasis on matrilineal (just another word of tail-female) descent
might be, it could be instructive to consider the background from
which the early European travelers were coming when they encountered
the Bedouin. In some ways our experience is as foreign to theirs
as theirs was to that of the desert raiders, so we can learn by
trying to understand the differences.
The
history of Europe is the story of small countries - often of individual
tribes - warring among themselves for control of circum- scribed
areas which they felt to be especially valuable. The great empires
which unified the scene were by comparison short-lived and even
during their heydays they did not unify the people in the sense
of producing a homogenized culture throughout their areas. This
is the background from which the many local varieties - isolated
from inter- crossing by wars and war's aftermath, suspicion and
rivalry - developed into "nations" of humans and "breeds" of livestock,
each closed among themselves.
Travelers
coming from this history were not prepared to under- stand that
the Bedouin "tribes" were nomads who wandered over vast areas in
the course of a year, their paths crossing and sometimes running
together. Even when individual tribes held themselves aloof from
their neighbors they were not physically isolated like the citizens
of little European countries barricaded behind their rivers and
mountain ranges. Each tribe doubtless held that its warriors were
the fiercest, its women the loveliest, its horses the swiftest and
most enduring - they were nomadic, not inhuman - but they were saying
and believing these things in a different context from the European
experience.
When the
Europeans heard the Bedouin describing the different lines of horses
which they maintained, it did not occur to them to ask whether they
could be, or ever were, inter-crossed. Such things were foreign
to their ideas of stock breeding which could not conceive of a single
breed spread over the Arab countries. Indeed, we are lucky that
the terminology did not become set at the earliest stage for it
would have us referring to Kehilan, Seglawi, Maneghi etc, as different
breeds; even the Blunts made this error at first though they learned
better soon enough.
There may
be some significance to the fact that the American, Homer Davenport,
when he journeyed with the Arabs buying horses for his 1906 importation,
did not come home with the idea of strain separation or of "good"
or "bad" strains. He recorded the strains of his horses and the
information he was given on them but when reading his accounts one
does not get the feeling he thought of this as anything but a source
of knowledge of their background. Certain strains are spoken of
as being prized in certain areas or by certain tribes but it is
not with the feeling of metaphysical superiority. Rather, these
became celebrated through the fame of celebrated individuals which
happened to belong to them.
In summary,
the Bedouin seem to have used a word which may be translated "strain"
in the first sense of the dictionary definition at the beginning
of this article. Perhaps it would have been better in a number of
ways to have called these entities just "families" rather than "family
strains" as we have come to do. European travelers who encountered
this idea interpreted it more along the lines of definition 3 and
of the animal breeding sense of Johanssen and Rendel. By questioning
the Bedouin and sometimes by their own observation of such horses
as they saw, the Europeans developed their own concept of "strain"
or even "breed" and took it home with them because the Bedouin sense
of "female family line" did not make sense to them. Only a few long-term
observers carried their ideas beyond this preliminary level.
Because the
casual observers outnumbered the careful ones and because even the
careful ones could be misled by thinking one tribe had examples
of strains that were like those of all tribes, the descriptions
of "the breeds of Arabians" became current in Europe. In fact, what
they were describing was not "the Seglawi breed" but "the Seglawis
of this tribe" and interpreting this in light of their own experience
(in which a breed name would not be used by two different groups
for their stock unless the stock were indeed the same in type and
by descent).
Implications of the Matrilineal
System
Emphasizing tail-female inheritance is foreign
to our Western way of doing things but indications are that it used
to be rather general among the human family. It is the more primitive
system and is based of course upon the fact that even members of
groups which have not quite worked out yet how offspring are fathered
are pretty clear on the fact that they have mothers (the women are
anyway). At a slightly later period of cultural development, it
still remains possible to wonder about paternity while maternity,
until the era of embryo transplants, was a fixed and certain quantity
defined by the legal phrase, "born from the body of".
In
our horse breeding example, it clearly must have appeared to the
hard-headed Bedouin that the thing to do was to place emphasis on
what you knew for certain. It may be going farther than the evidence
warrants to suggest that at an early point in their tradition sires
were not known or at least not recorded. Even had this been the
case at some time, of course they were too sophisticated not to
have come to the realization eventually that emphasis on sires was
important in horse breeding. After all, aside from any traditions
of maintaining "the right Arabian breed," their success in raiding
and at times their lives depended on the horses they bred. There
is surely no question of ignoring sires in historical times - strains
of both parents are almost always given on desertbreds that have
come into our knowledge through being sold to Westerners.
It seems
that as far back as we have any record, the Arabs used and emphasized
the mares; stallions were a noisy but necessary encumbrance and
the great majority of colts was sold. This implies that, with few
stallions in each tribe, most of the young stock of any generation
would be shared out among relatively few male parents. And it follows
necessarily that much of the visible variation among the youngsters
would be attributable to their dams. This would tend to reinforce
the matrilineal emphasis.
We are told
in the records of the Abbas Pasha purchases that certain strains
(in particular one Seglawi family) were uniform when the mares were
bred to stallions of the same strain but varied more in shape when
the sires were of other strains. This is often quoted to show that
the Bedouin crossed strains and as often used to show that they
bred them within themselves to fix type. I think a much more interesting
implication emerges if you consider the scarcity of stallions maintained
for breeding in the desert along with this description of strain
behavior when outcrossed or not. If much of the breeding of a tribe's
mares was done within the tribe, then a small choice of sires was
available. If out of this small number a Seglawi was to be picked
for the Seglawi mares, it was highly likely that all the Seglawi
mares would be bred to one and the same horse. Naturally, if the
mares were related by female line and they were bred to the same
sire, the offspring should have been uniform. Since, further ,the
Seglawi stallions) of a tribe must have come from that tribe's Seglawi
mares, it suggests that mares were bred to their own near relations
in female line if they were bred within strain within the tribe.
I
sometimes get the feeling that modern Arab breeders think of "strain"
almost in the sense of definition 2 of this article, as a mystical
or metaphysical quality. I think it is important to keep in mind
that if a stain type were fixed in any given situation, it was done
so by the straightforward and comprehensible action of inbreeding
and selection.
Maternal Inheritance
We have considered mammalian sex determination
any number of times. Recall that sex is determined by chromosomal
constitution. Normally XX individuals are female and XY individuals
are male (where X and Y refer to the sex determining chromosomes).
Recall too that chromosomal segregation is random. Genes from the
other chromosomes of the individual do not travel with any particular
sex chromosome. It is also completely a matter of chance whether
a fertilized egg is XX and will be a female or XY and will be a
male.
Figure 1
shows the consequences of this mode of sex determination on the
sex chromosome make-up of sons and daughters of sires and dams.
Only the sex chromosome are indicated as the others all assort at
random compared with this pair. Note that the Y chromosome follows
a patrilineal mode of inheritance; the Y chromosome of any male
came from his sire, his sire's sire, and right on back.
Note that a male offspring always
receives his sire's Y chromosome and never receives
the sire's X chromosome. The female, of course, must
receive one x from each parent. This means that the
Y chromosome, because it is male-determining, always
follows the "tail male" line. There is no such necessary
pattern with the X chromosome; a female must receive
an X from her own dam, but she need not receive one
from her maternal granddam. (The numerical subscripts
serve to distinguish one chromosome of the same type
from another - they are not meant to have genetic significance.)
There is no comparable matrilineal
pattern. Since each individual has at least one X chromosome,
it is possible in as few as two generations to lose
both X chromosomes of the original female founder. (NB:
mitochondrial DNA is not mentioned because this was
written about 20 years ago.)
In other
words, any tail- male Skowronek stallion has Skowronek's
Y chromosome. A tail- female Bint Helwa mare is no more
likely to have Bint Helwa's X chromosome than she is
any other chromosomes.
Two points here: firstly, there is little
crossing over between X and Y and thus we can speak of the Y as
being handed on as a unit unlike other chromosomes; secondly, the
Y has little or no known function beyond sex determination. Having
Skowronek's Y chromosome implies only that his descendant will resemble
him in being male, not necessarily in any other traits.
Something
can be said for maternal inheritance in the sense that the egg is
a much larger cell than the sperm and thus contributes much more
mass to the earliest developmental stages. This becomes a case of
splitting hairs in defining "inheritance" for it is just as true
to say that the maternal parent has more environmental influence
on the off- spring than the sire. This begins from the moment of
fertilization and continues at least until weaning. It might be
best to formulate this as "the dam being the single most important
influence in the offspring's environment up to the time of weaning"
rather than trying to define "maternal inheritance". Chromosomally
of course the two parents make exactly equal contributions to the
offspring's genotype.
"Family Strains" in Modern Breeding
Every modern Arabian has a strain except for
a few whose strains were lost because early-day records were not
kept as we might have liked before the founding of the various Studbooks.
Of course those, the knowledge of whose strains is lost, still have
them; we just don't know what they are beyond the generic "Kehilan
Ajuz" or "Old Thoroughbred". It is interesting to speculate about
the significance of strain names today, especially when there are
relatively few sources of a particular strain name (as the Kehilan
Dajani which seems to trace back in all cases to just two 19th century
foundation mares, Dajania in England and Mlecha in Poland). As we
understand the family strain system, this must mean that a Kehilan
Dajani of one country is related to an individual of the same strain
in another country. The question of course is, "How closely related?"
and the answer is, "Probably not very."
"Strain
breeding" in a more specialized sense is practiced by those who
attempt, by working within a limited group, to reconstitute separate
strains by close breeding among the descendants of each foundation
mare, or small group of mares of the same strain. This certainly
is "strain breeding" according to the sense of Johanssen and Rendel
- "the aim of breeding is different," in this case in meaning to
separate the stains - and it also agrees with all senses of the
dictionary definition 1. We would like to hope that definition 3
would also be applicable here but of course the key is that the
"high standard" is "maintained.... by selection," and that differs
with the individual breeders involved.
Whether or
to what extent modern "strain bred" Arabians resemble the original
Bedouin versions of their named strains is a trickier question.
We have seen that it is at least open to discussion whether the
strains ever were uniform and bred to a certain general type in
the desert. It is certainly difficult to accept that all the characteristics
of the members of a given strain, as they existed 200 years ago
in the desert, can be recaptured by inbreeding one family deriving
the strain name from one or two mares and containing contributions
from many other strains along the way. To risk being repetitious,
this absolutely is "breeding a strain" or "strain breeding." The
questions are whether the Bedouin practiced "strain breeding" in
this sense - and if they did how closely modern horses bred within
a named strain resemble their desert progenitors.
What Strain Breeding Means to
Me
I'm for it, every time, in the 3rd dictionary
sense. If you aren't trying to develop "a special line of individuals
.... maintained at a high standard of perfection by selection" then
I don't want you breeding Arabian horses. If thinking in terms of
strains helps you to reach this goal, then go to it. On the other
hand, of course, if confusion over "family strains" gets in the
way of emphasis on the "selection" aspect, then give up family strains
by all means.
The Bedouin
seem to have done just fine without them until at least the 14th
century when the Arab type was already numbering its age in the
thousands of years.
