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Thoughts on CMK Identity
Michael Bowling copyright 1995
"CMK" is not the same as "Crabbet."
Breeders and enthusiasts of the CMK horses really must embrace that identity and get away from "Crabbet" except in specific reference to the Crabbet pedigree element-the horses of the Blunts, Lady Wentworth and Cecil Covey. Too many people outside our ranks have the idea that "it's all Crabbet" if they don't know what else to call it. In that mental fog the straight Crabbets, their subsets and their GSB and Crabbet-old English associates, lose their distinctiveness and are in genuine danger of losing their existence.
There are other aspects to this, none of them trivial: Davenport and Hamidie, Old English and Maynesboro French, Hearst and Harris, early Polish and Egyptian and other ancestors, all belong to the story. The horses and their breeders deserve recognition in their own right, not to be dismissed even by implication as somehow contaminating the "Crabbet" breeding tradition. Conversely, breeders who do realize that their horses are not "all Crabbet" must not get the mistaken impression that they don't belong with the CMK Heritage. It is basic that we present a unified face to the world. Even if we do not take up a combative tone, or present ourselves as being in competition with one another, we are in effect competing for the hearts and minds and attention spans of the interested public, so long as they see multiple public identities for the same set of horses. A confused message is a confusing message.
CMK is "a" Crabbet breeding tradition
Of course CMK is "a" Crabbet breeding tradition, out of the universe of possible Crabbet breeding traditions; half or more of a contemporary CMK pedigree on average likely will run to Crabbet sources. CMK is not the entirety of the Crabbet heritage, whose threads run almost throughout the modern breed; horses with Crabbet ancestry can be very different from CMK Arabians. Within the CMK approach, straight Crabbet, GSB and Crabbet-old English Arabians are prized both in themselves and as blended with other sources-but they can be available for future use only if they are preserved now. The more effectively we preserve the genetic resources of such ingredient groups today, the better will be their situation in the future, and the more effectively will they continue to play their historic role.
Donoghue and Lewisfield (Friendship and Al-Marah and Gainey; McCoy and Shalimar and Sunny Acres, Lodwick and Skyline...all those breeding programs which grew out of the Reese and Dean circles) are/were CMK programs, even though CMK was defined after the fact. They transmitted a heritage founded by the Blunts and Davenport, along with more or less of other elements. They differed in accidentals, according to the horses they started out with and which mare lines happened to be more prolific or to suit a particular sire. They also came to differ more basically in terms of individual vision.
Some breeders have the "eye" for combining horses and some don't, but even if two people are equally good at that, each will develop a personal preference-or they did in the days when we had breeding programs (cf Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, "we had faces then"). One sees less and less of the traditional breeding program, among short-term modern entities that are briefly publicized and then disappear within five or six years, each one starting up with a complex mix of whatever the last two or three threw on the market when they dispersed. There are only a homogenized few common threads, in terms of popular sires, now; hardly anybody stays around long enough to develop an individual flavor based in mare families.
The Cult of the Sire
"The cult of the sire," as we call it, can do immeasurable harm. That obsession with finding "the one sire" where it doesn't matter what mare you breed to him, his foals are automatically the ultimate, leads in many wrong directions-perhaps especially within a preservationist context.
In the first place it simply is silly, and does not reflect biological reality-even if we all could agree on one ideal horse for all time and all uses, horses do not sire themselves. They hand on a random sample of their genes-and it does profoundly matter what mare you breed to any sire, the mare is going to provide half her foal's genes and the foal is just as likely to hand on (leave alone to express) hers as the sire's. There is an idea in circulation, based on the fact that one does not physically need as many stallions as mares in order to maintain numbers, that stallions are somehow genetically different from mares. This simply is not so, when considering the individual mating.
In the second place, the "cult of the sire" is open to a poisonous interpretation, completely inimical to a preservationist approach. One can't ever admit whichever horse was just used, was not the one and only true and ultimate sire. The offspring (whether they're sons or daughters), either are perfect ("awesome" seems to be the word latterly) or are to be discarded. When time comes to breed them they must go to something completely different-historically to the newest import or the latest National Champion. The result is the mob of horses we see around us in the breed at large, where individuals may stand out for a moment but too many of the Arabians registered are neither one thing nor another. This stands in startling contrast to the CMK horses presented at the Albany Symposium, each of which represented its own style of Arabian, but practically all of which were distinctive and distinguished individuals.
Biology is Variation
The nature of biology is variation-there never was a time (nor will be) when all horses of any set were/are identical and beyond criticism (and note that those ideas are not the same anyway). All pre-war Polish mares did not look like KOALICJA any more than all straight Blunt desert mares looked like BUKRA. We all prefer the better individuals of any line to the worse, but common sense should tell us we can never reduce an aspect of the Arabian breed to one individual, and still maintain that distinctive kind of horse. Preservation means recognizing that you either have a particular genetic entity, or you don't. It means breeding good individuals within a coherent biological reality.
On Preservation
Of course "preserving" anything without letting others know where it is, and why it is worth while, is an ultimately pointless exercise: preservationists must promote their views. We must never mistake promotion for preservation-or get into a biological muddle just because it might be easier in the short term to bring together the owners of a random collection. After 10 years of the original 75% pedigree minimum, CMK was in danger of becoming a straight promotional entity, or of appearing so, because we were seeing a grab bag of "accidental CMK horses." CMK activities could be used to promote horses selected and bred in the style of other breeding traditions, but which "accidentally" added up to 75% CMK ancestry. This movement was started because the CMK mares were being grafted over to imported sire lines-it set out specifically to keep a kind of Arabian going, through the CMK Heritage Catalogues, encouraging the use of CMK sires on CMK mares. The sire line requirement was instituted to head off a perceived slippage counter to this direction.
The definition is a matter of history and philosophy, of what CMK is meant to be doing. No one ever claimed the right to tell anyone else what to do-only whether, having done what they wanted to do, they should call the results a CMK Arabian. (Surely if you like CMK Arabians and see they are different from others, you will want to know more about how and why they are different, and more importantly, how to maintain that difference.) Remember above all, CMK is program-oriented: the point of the 75% requirement is specifically not to get bogged down in bitty discussions of fractions of a percent, in the pedigrees of individual horses. CMK breeders can make use of any line or individual which advances them toward a beautiful, useful traditional Arabian-the ultimate goal remains the CMK kind of horse. Genetic preservation requires increasing rather than diluting the CMK ancestral element, and preserving the historical sire lines. At the same time, specifically CMK activities are meant to promote a specific kind of horse. Pedigree guidelines are needed, to choose those exemplars of individual programs which will represent the CMK cause, in the Catalogues and at the Symposia.
The horses are going to lose out, if the people don't remember that our purpose is demonstrating how a CMK Arabian looks and moves and acts. That doesn't mean we can't discuss pedigrees, only that we can't discuss, or be seen to discuss, only pedigrees. Pedigrees are no use if they are not producing the kind of Arabian horse that inspired this discussion in the first place. The point of this exercise is-CMK pedigrees demonstrably continue to produce those horses.