I didn’t intend for nearly ten months to pass before I wrote the second installment of what I had originally envisioned to be this (ambitious) series of articles that would simultaneously inform and captivate with the particulars and peculiarities of breeding SE (Straight Egyptian) Arabian horses, conflated with political and social satire of my choosing.

Initially I had planned for my second article to be about bloodlines, in which I would compare the small gene pool of SE Arabian horses with George W. Bush's narrow gene pool and eventually demonstrate in some novel way reasons why, according to my almost 97-year-old Grandmother Sue, he is a worse president than even Warren G. Harding (and how many people can make such a comparison first-hand?). But then it became clear around that time that most everyone—even his Revelations-loving core constituents—thought he was a horse’s ass (breed of horse’s ass unspecified), and whether he deserved it or not, ridiculing the President seemed akin to taunting the kid in class, who because he picked his nose or kept his fingernail clippings in a Mason jar or smelled like pee, made it safe for even geeky crybaby kids like me to participate in some Lord of the Flies-style stone-throwing, which coming from an adult seems at once undignified and unfunny.

Moreover, an unrelated bloodline issue weighed on me. Specifically my bloodlines. I’m a purebred descendant of Ashkenazic Jews. I can trace every line in my pedigree all the way to my great grandparents (and even great great grandparents in a few cases) to a set area ranging from what is now Eastern Poland to Belarus, and perhaps stretching north into Lithuania.

My breeding oddly parallels that of the SE Arabian, which according to The Pyramid Society, must:

(1) be registered or eligible by pedigree for registration by the Arabian Horse Association [http://www.arabianhorses.org/registration/reg_breed_conformation.asp]; AND
(2) trace in every line of its pedigree to horses born in Arabia Deserta; AND
(3) trace in every line of its pedigree to a horse which falls within one or more of the following categories:

(a) owned or bred by Abbas Pasha I or Ali Pasha Sherif;
(b) used to create and maintain the Royal Agricultural Society (RAS)/Egyptian Agricultural Organization (EAO) breeding programs, with the exclusion of Registan and Sharkasi and their lineal descendants;
(c) a horse which was a lineal ancestor of a horse described in (a) or (b) above; and
(*) other than those excluded above, a horse conceived and born in a private stud program in Egypt and imported directly to the United States and registered by the Arabian Horse Registry of America prior to the extension of the EAO's supervision to private Egyptian stud programs as reflected in Volume 4 of the EAO's stud book.

Nevertheless, I’ve long had the impression that people of my religion and ethnicity are not especially welcome by those inhabiting the land of the desert horse. And I’m not one to stick around somewhere just to prove a point.

*Image: San Sabbah Isis, who belongs to the author.