Bedouin Beauty: The Rosewater Horses

Ambition (*Bask x Bint Ambara)

"His withers rise to a neck far reaching upwards, below a breast blood-stained, like a stone on which saffron is ground." - Salaam ibn-Jandal, from The Classic Arabian Horse

In The Classic Arabian Horse,  Judith Forbis tells us that the Bedouins classified grey coloured horses (al ashab) into seven distinctive types, of which she wrote,  "the most favored was al ashab al marshoush, and he resembles the bird and is the strongest and tallest and he is called al thobabi (flea-bitten)." Dr. Hans Nagel, in his book, Hanan, says that the Bedouin considered the flea-bitten grey coat color to be the original wild color, which returns to the horse, as part of the aging process. And Lady Wentworth, in her famous literary work honoring the breed, her mother and the Crabbet Park breeding program, said that the color grey is indigenous to the Bedouin horse and proof that a grey colored Arabian horse is purebred, free of common blood.

In some horses who are born with a solid body color, the coat hairs, much like the hair of a human, "turns" grey, as the horse begins to mature. In Federico Tesio's book, Breeding Thoroughbred Horses, he explains it like this, "grey is not itself a coat, but a pathological discoloration of the only two basic coats which are the bay and the chestnut."  In some horses, the intensification of the white coat hair progresses to such a degree that the coat eventually loses all pigmentation and becomes a radiant, silvery white; while in other horses, a genetic phenomenon occurs affecting the chromosomes and the loss of the greying gene. The pigmentation of the coat hair is somewhat reestablished, resulting in the flecking (flea bites), which appear in a reddish tone or in some flea-bitten horses, a darker color altogether. In some horses, the flecking is so profuse, that the coat color appears to have a pale pinkish hue or better yet, a rosy color, i.e. rosewater horses. But why call it flea bites? Well, the flecking looks like bloody marks made by the bites of the insects, which always made me wonder why they couldn't come up with a better name than something so nasty as a flea bite?

The *Bask son, Ambition, out of the Comet daughter, Bint Ambara was profusely flea-bitten. When I think of flea-bitten horses, I think of him, as he was one of the horses of my youth who had a profound effect upon me and my developing appreciation for classic Arabian horse type. I adored this horse, in every photograph published of him. Bred by Lasma Arabians, Ambition was purchased by Mulawa Arabian Stud in 1975, where he remained as herd stallion until he died in 1985. The interesting thing about Ambition is that his sire (*Bask) was bay in color (his dam, Bint Ambara was grey) but *Bask's full sister, Bandola (the dam of *Bandos) was also flea-bitten and like Ambition, profusely so!

Bandola (Witraz x Balalajka)

At first glance, Ambition's pedigree appears to be influenced by grey horses (75%) but in studying his pedigree a little deeper, there's a bit of a pattern between horses of a bay color and grey. *Bask was sired by Witraz, a bay, who was sired by Ofir (also bay) out of Makata, a grey. While Bint Ambara is the result of two grey parents, her sire Comet, is the son of Abu Afas, a brown horse, out of Carmen, a grey. Her dam, Ambara, was sired by Wielki Szlem, a bay, out of Alhambra, a grey. The only horse who breaks the repeating pattern of top crossing  a colored horse onto a grey,  is the mare Balalajka, who is by a grey stallion, Amurath Sahib, out of a chestnut mare, Iwonka (although in the next generation, Alhambra is sired by a grey, Kaszmir, out of a bay mare Atfa). It is also interesting to note that Wielki Szlem, unlike his brother, Witraz, is the son of two bay-colored parents, infusing the maternal side of the pedigree with more of the bay color. Why does it matter if one ancestor has a bay body color and another is grey? Well, to me, it means that the flea-bitten color is not the end result of breeding homozygous grey horses but rather, it is a body color more commonly occurring in heterozygous grey horses.

Over the years, I have known flea-bitten horses of varying degrees of the color, however, it was the more intensely speckled horses, who caught my attention, as they were also distinctive (and unforgettable) in their presentation of breed type, as if they were a type unto themselves. Dr. Nagel, expressed a similar sentiment in Hanan. He said that the flea-bitten horses were more refined, typier horses with generally, no markings and possessing very dark skin pigmentation. Dr. Nagel feels that intensified Arabian type and the flea-bitten color were in some special way linked together. Dr. Nagel says,

"Bearing in mind that the colour chromosome is especially large and linked to many attributes, this indicates a valuable incentive for continuing to preserve an admired attribute from bygone times which appears to have become linked to a part of breeding history."

I also remember a Polish gelding whose flea-bitten coat felt so different when I touched him. The hair was very short in length, like the short coat that horses have during the hottest months of the summer, before they start to grow winter coats but this particular horse's coat possessed an extra-fine texture that really surprised me. I wasn't expecting it. The dark color of his skin intensified the reddish tint of his speckled coat, which at a distance, did really appear to be rose in color. All these years later, I still remember him, as I remember the rosewater horse of my youth, a horse who fueled my interest and my "Ambition" to understand these desert horses better, while celebrating their extraordinary and very unique characteristics.

***This blog post is lovingly dedicated to Dr. Hans Joachim Nagel, in gratitude for his most wonderful book, Hanan, in which he presents a most compelling school of thought on the origin of the Arabian horse.***