NK Nada - A Matter of Strain

At first glance, you may miss that NK Nada is a result of a half-brother/half-sister breeding combination, as both her sire, Adnan and her dam, Nashua, are paternal siblings, sired by Salaa el Dine. Bred by Dr. Nagel of Katharinenhof in Germany, owned for several years by Usamah Alkazemi of Ezzain in Kuwait; she is now owned by Al Waab in Qatar.

In Dr. Nagel's new book, The Arabian Horse: Nature's Creation and the Art of Breeding, he writes about the stallion Adnan. He said, "The mares bred by Adnan became one of the strongest and finest group on the farm and they were the easiest to breed from amongst all of the available families. Adnan's contribution to the Hadban line was highly positive. He transmitted to them the required balance of body structure which needed improvement in many horses belonging to this family." Adnan was out of Ghazala, a daughter of the Dahman stallion, Ghazal and out of Hanan, an Abeyyah. As Nashua and Adnan were paternal siblings; Salaa el  Dine and Ghazala were maternal siblings.

In tail female, NK Nada is a Hadbah, tracing through her maternal line back to Venus. However, if we go to the 4th generation of Nada's pedigree, the generation of the great  grandparents, we see something totally different, in terms of which strain impacts her most. Approximately 37.5% of her pedigree is Dahman and an equal percentage is Abeyyan. The Hadban strain is a small percentage of influence, at only 12.5% of her pedigree, as is Kuhaylan Rodan. In the next generation, the strain percentages support a Dahman influence at 37.5%, with half of this percentage coming from the sire side and half from the mare side. The Hadban strain represents 18.75%, as does the Abeyyan strain, while the Kuhaylan Rodan strain is 25%.

So why is all of this important you ask? Studying the tail female line is only a small part of this horse and may not present a balanced picture of all the influences that resulted in this wonderful mare. And, most importantly, the intensity of the crosses, that is, half siblings bred to each other, occurs in two generations, back-to-back: her parents and grandparents, which concentrate all of the ancestral elements brought forward by these four individuals. This is a small example of why it is important to study pedigrees, so that you may gain a better understanding of the horse that stands in front of you.