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| Introduction
- Part 3: The Origin and Relationships of the Mustang, Barb, and Arabian Horse Written by Deb Bennett, Ph.D. © 2004 by Deb Bennet, Ph.D. The Origin of the Arabian Breed It is important to understand and appreciate the Barb horse, because as history drew down to the 7th century of our era, an event of the greatest significance occurred: the angel Gabriel appeared to Mohammed in a cave in Mecca, and made of him a most persuasive prophet. On fire with the new revelation and a rule for living that made sense to them, thousands of committed followers of Mohammed united to conquer and swiftly convert almost the whole of the Near East. Within a century of Mohammed’s death, all of the old Persian Empire had accepted Islam. As brothers united in religious fervor, the Persians yielded up to their Arab conquerors all the deeper secrets of horse-breeding and horsemanship which had been their almost exclusive possession for many centuries. For the first time in their history, Arabian peoples acquired horses in numbers, and from the finest of these, which hailed from the foothill country at the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the Bedouin sheikhs at long last began to craft the Arabian breed. After sweeping success to the east, the armies of Islam looked west. In the early decades of the 8th century they took lower Egypt, then Morocco and the rest of the north African coast. They brought few horses into this region, partly because of the barriers posed by the Sinai and the Nile, but largely in fact because the region was already full of horses apt to their purposes. Thus on a fog-shrouded day in the year 711, an Islamic scouting party embarked from North Africa. Landing upon the Iberian side and reporting little resistance, they were quickly reinforced by an armada bearing many mounted soldiers. The first great victory of Islam in Iberia was fought at Jérez de la Frontera in the very heartland of Iberian horse-breeding, the province of Estremadura. Within two years, the armies of Islam had completely overrun the Iberian Peninsula. Origin of the Iberian Jennet Thus began nearly eight centuries of Islamic rule. During the whole of this period, knowledgeable and discriminating Islamic leaders supervised the breeding of horses both for war and for pleasure-riding, and raised the art of horse-breeding to heights which have never been surpassed in Iberia or anywhere else. One of their innovations was the pedigree. This came directly from Bedouin traditions in Arabia, where strict codes of honor forbade the falsification of a horse’s ancestry. When in January of 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella, Christian king and queen, uprooted the last stronghold of Islam in Iberia by conquering the city and fortress of Granada, they took over not only the Grenadine stud but its tradition of careful pedigree-keeping. This the king placed in the hands of Carthusian monks – because they could read and write. The product of their breeding program eventually came to be known as the Cartujeno.
Beginning with Columbus’ second voyage in 1493, horses of Jennet type were successively imported to the Caribbean, Panama, Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala and Nicaragua. At a little later period, Spanish and Portuguese explorers, conquistadors, and colonists took them to Peru, Argentina, and Brazil. Last of all, some two centuries after Columbus’ initial voyage, they were brought from northern Mexico to Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was from this point in space and time that the dispersal of the mustang northward through the Great Plains of the U.S. and Canada began. Technically speaking, a mustang is a feral horse – an escapee from domestication – rather than a wild animal. The mustang lives wild, by his wits and instincts, but somewhere deep inside every mustang is a memory of the more than two thousand year symbiosis with mankind in the Iberian Peninsula. People who can harmonize with this, who can understand it, sympathize with it and communicate with it, succeed with mustangs. Such were many Native American tribes in the arid southwest and the Plains, and such too are many people of other cultures and extractions who now live in North, Central, and South America. Frank T. Hopkins was one man who had this ability. He could sympathize with a horse, could put himself in its place, and thus in the act of riding a horse he could effectively compensate for the stresses which riding necessarily imposes upon the animal. Sympathetic to an equal degree with their own horses are the Bedouins of Arabia. Cousins that they are, derivative alike of the original Afro-Turkic strain, both the mustang and the Arabian have inherited the physiology necessary for great endurance. More importantly, they both understand and are willing to tolerate people. They have great intelligence to go along with great endurance; stout and generous hearts beating alike as even today they continue to leave footprints in the sand. This is the true circle of the relationship of the mustang and the Arabian – the full circle, thousands of years in the making. References Cited Bennett, Deb and Robert S. Hoffmann. 1999. Equus caballus, Mammalian Species no. 628, pp. 1-14. Bennett, Deb. 1998. Conquerors: The Roots of New World Horsemanship. Amigo Publications, Solvang, CA, 422 pp. |
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this site sponsored by The Horse of the Americas Registry, & IRAM - the Institute of Range and the American Mustang email:info@frankhopkins.com |
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