♘امیرحسین♞
♘ مدیریت انجمن اسب ایران ♞
by Maria Marquise Baverstock
Co-Director of Akhal-Teke UK Ltd
(NOTE: this report is the personal opinion of Maria Marquise Baverstock but the following questionnaire has been approved by Klimuk and Babaev and will be fed back to the Executive Committee so please fill it out if you want to have an input in the formation of the World Akhal-Teke Organization.)
Background
For 3000 years Central Asian nomads engaged in selective horse breeding for speed and stamina, to give the world the oldest known “thoroughbred” horse. They passed down their knowledge of sire lines through oral tradition, bred the best to the best, regarded the horses amongst their most cherished possessions and gave them as gifts to foreign emmisaries.
The diminishing significance of the Silk Route hailed the decline of their traditional customs, and with it, reduced the dependency of the Turkic tribes on their horses. After the annexation by the Russian Empire of the vast stretches of land east of the Caspian Sea, the dwindling horse population was rescued by the Russian colonial administrators. They gathered information from the Turkmen elders and lay the foundations of the modern Akhal-Teke breed by creating a first recorded studbook.
In the Soviet Union of which Turkmenistan became one of the fifteen Socialist Republics, their work was awarded official status and placed in the care of the All-Soviet Institute of Horse Breeding, VNIIK. Seven volumes of the General Akhal-Teke Studbook (GPK) were published between 1941 and 1993. GPK continued to exist after the Soviet Union broke up in the early 1990s when the “All-Soviet Institute” changed name to “All-Russian” (with the acronym VNIIK conveniently not affected by the organisation name change). VNIIK retained control over the studbook, meanwhile a host of momentous events took place which reshaped the “fame and fortune” of the Akhal-Teke breed:
Turkmenistan became an independent nation-state with the largest population of Akhal-Teke horses;
private horse ownership became the backbone of equestrian industry in the former Soviet states, encouraged by the extreme pace of economic growth;
Akhal-Teke horses began to be exported to Europe and US, mostly via Russia;
animal breeding embraced DNA testing and, along with many other spheres of life, entered the internet age.
In recognition of the pace of change, the International Association of Akhal-Teke Breeders was founded in 1994 in Dubna, named MAAK (“M” is for “International” in Russian). Its membership, based on the numbers of purebred mares’ owned, with collective membership also available, was never a pre-requisite to registering a horse into the studbook.
Throughout the 1990s, some countries with sizeable Akhal-Teke population started to maintain their own national registries while other countries found it hard to unite breeders and owners and to come up with a coherent system of breed management.
In 2004 a momentous event took place in France where, out of many years of disagreements, emerged a single, government-approved association which opened a French National Akhal-Teke studbook under an official agreement with VNIIK. The Akhal-Teke breed gained the official recognition in France and for the first time in the French equestrian history, the Akhal-Teke are now allowed to take part in French competitions.
The possibility to work with VNIIK under a “Service Level Agreement” became an attractive proposition for other countries: Switzerland, I believe, is in the process of negotiating such agreement and UK has just signed theirs. Cooperation efforts are not without their problems, as language, distance and lack of time all play their part in frustrating the best of intentions.
These positive developments, however, took place against the backdrop of what is probably the most negative event in the history of the Akhal-Teke breed in the last 100 years: from 2001, Turkmen-born horses ceased to be registered in the GPK. Turkmenistan has a laboratory but it is not ISAG-approved. It is alleged that many horses have been crossed with other breeds, mostly English TB, to increase their success in racing.
21st century also sees the atrophy of MAAK as an institution: it holds no regular meetings, does not publish accounts and does not hold elections. It is alleged by some that MAAK had never really worked properly in the first place, as it was too biased in favour of Russian breeders and had a Turkmen dictator as a bizarre and somewhat offensive figurehead at its helm. Horse registration, breed statistics, regulations and publication of the studbook have continued to be managed by VNIIK, though, oddly enough, a document confirming a horse’s pedigree is issued by VNIIK under the name of MAAK Passport.
Do We Need an International Organisation?
In the light of such complexities born out of a multitude of historical factors, the question posed by the organisers of the Akhal-Teke Breed Management conference at Equiros 2008 “Do we need an international organisation?” is not an easy one to answer.
The stated remit of WATO is to regulate the national studbooks, to promote racing, to organise world championships under a unified system of judging, to educate the public and create investment opportunities. An ambitious remit indeed!
All participants voted “yes” in reply to the key question - “Do we need an international organisation?”, at least judged by the show of hands in an open vote. However, Mr Abdulrahman Osmanov, an eminent surgeon and the owner of many famous horses, including Garayusup, raised the possibility of reforming MAAK. He drew an analogy which likened MAAK to an engine which had never been deployed. “It is idling without fuel. Should fuel be finally added to it?” He also warned against creating more problems than would be solved by starting a new organisation from scratch.
In my mind, his address translates into three basic questions:
Should MAAK be dissolved before WATO is incorporated? (this presupposes that current MAAK members should be consulted).
Where should WATO be incorporated? (arguably, one of the perceived problems of MAAK has always been its bias towards Russia and Russian breeders.)
Who would be making the above decisions? (considering that WATO itself does not exist, as it has not produced a constitution yet and has not been registered)
Studbook Management
The most controversial aspect of WATO’s declared remit is studbook management. The organisers of WATO propose to create an electronic portal to which all horses registered in the national studbooks are entered. It is, at this stage, unclear, whether a horse would always need to be registered in a national studbook prior to entering a central register or whether a direct registration would also be allowed.
The potential attraction of an electronic portal is hard to argue with in this day and age. The opportunity to extract a list of all horses born in a particular year across a range of bloodlines, compare their measurements and gradings, to name but one of the numerous possibilities, is music to my computer-wizened fingers. These possibilities were outlined at the WATO conference by Todd Keith who has long been involved in the work to database GPK. But where does one start from, when all existing records are kept in VNIIK archives and published by them in GPK? A lively discussion took place on what constitutes database copyright, who owns the test results, who should take blood and how does one know that test results belong to a particular horse…
As I leaf through my two precious Soviet-red, hardbound volumes of GPK X, I am awed by the magnitude of effort which must have gone into the compilation of the existing studbook. Yes, I know it has mistakes, yes, it did take ten years to get published, yes, to buy it, one has to use unofficial couriers who pass cash to VNIIK via personal contacts in Moscow. Plus, I hear from those who have been to VNIIK itself (I haven’t) that the filing system is ancient. And still… or maybe precisely because of all this, one cannot but remain cautious about rocking this fragile boat. But, to continue the marine analogy, nor does one wish to deflate the sails on the boat of change!
Change, in this instance, can take place within several different frameworks:
WATO cooperates with VNIIK to reform and modernise the logistics of registration and studbook management, including the creation of electronic portal, while VNIIK retains the ownership of the studbook or…
WATO and VNIIK do not cooperate and WATO starts a new electronic studbook, having to not only build the records from scratch but also gain the credibility of breeders worldwide and persuade them to register horses into the new studbook in preference to GPK.
WATO processes registrations carried out by national studbooks or…
WATO accepts direct registrations, based on test results presented by owners who choose to by-pass their national register.
These are just some of the questions WATO Breeding Committee would need to address.
The most critical question is what happens with the Turkmen horses. There was one Turkmen breeder at the Moscow conference, Ovlyakuli Sharipov. He addressed the audience with an appeal to breeders to “show more trust”:
“If you come to me”, he said, “and I tell you that my horses are pure, what reason do you have to disbelieve me? Yes, of course, in my country there have been instances of purebred horses being bred to non-purebreds, these crosses are mostly used for races or for baiga. But if I say “my horses are pure”, why would you, as a buyer, not believe me?”.
I visited Ovlyakuli in 2000 at his home in Ashkhabad, enjoyed his hospitality… tea and dried fruit at the low table covered with Turkmen tapestries. As I sat in front of the microphone, in Moscow in 2008, translating Ovlyakuli’s words into English, the cultural differences penetrating this breed seemed vast.
What is “International”?
In comparison, the questions surrounding the setting up of a Jockey Club, Education and International Communications Committees don’t seem insurmountable, or do they?
As of today, we still do not have an English translation of the conference minutes expertly recorded in Russian by Nadezhda Tarasova and the Committee nominations in the Russian version of the protocol are slightly different from those in the English summary. The question of translation is a very real one in the context of an international organisation dominated by non-Engish-speaking members. To function effectively, WATO needs a pool of dedicated translators who would agree to commit a set number of hours per week to cope with all the documentation produced by its Committees. As a former professional translator, I cannot over-emphasise the magnitude and the importance of this task. ??But there is even more to international communications than language. As it has now transpired, several breeders did not receive an invitation to the conference. VNIIK did receive an invitation but as this was sent to its Director, rather than to T.N. Ryabova herself, she chose not to attend, despite the efforts of several people, myself included, to persuade her to take part. A representative of the VNIIK IT Department, Mr Podobaev, did attend and made some very interesting and provocative comments, giving a brief account of the history of VNIIK accreditation with Wetherby’s. He expressed surprise that the Akhal-Teke breed is one of the few which are still having issues with studbook management.
It is futile to dwell now on who and why was and was not invited, and to speculate on the possible ulterior motives. What is certain is that a much greater degree of active international involvement is needed if WATO is justify the “W” in its name.
Following the conference, I have drawn a list of questions which can, hopefully, be put to breeders worldwide, to survey their views on the current system and gather their proposals on how they would like to see their breed managed. My personal view is that a survey of opinions should have been conducted prior to the conference and discussions should have been based around its results.
I also felt that open vote for Committee nominations was not appropriate in the circumstances. The protocol recorded a unanimous vote for every candidate which, I felt, was obtained, at least in part, through social pressure. Personally, I found it hard to vote “no” when everyone in the room was raising their hands to say “yes”, especially, as the people for whom we were voting were sitting in the same room. I did valiantly attempt to disrupt the unanimity by registering my friendly voice against Babaev’s nomination to one of the Committees, though which one I can no longer recall. For an odd reason, I cannot seem to find my courageous “no” anywhere in the Russian version of the protocol.
All in all, I left the conference with mixed feelings but I am keenly aware that the easiest stance to take now is to criticise its organisation, to doubt the viability of WATO and the motives of its organisers. Having been unanimously elected to the International Communications Committee, I consider it my duty to involve the widest possible range of interested parties in the WATO initiative.
To this effect, I am attaching below a questionnaire on key issues affecting the Akhal-Teke breeders and owners today. Please fill it out and return to contact@akhaltekeuk.com
The Akhal-Teke Breed Management Conference at Equiros
18 August 2008, Moscow
Additional Questions to Conference Participants and all other interested parties.
A question was put to the participants of the conference: “So we need an international organisation or not?”.
I would like to add several detailed questions and ask conference participants and any other interested parties to reply, so that the new organisation could, in effect, become “international”.
You can reply anonymously but please mark to which category you belong:
Breeder with 10 or more purebred mares
Breeder with 5-10 mares
Private owner who is engaged in breeding on a small scale – less than five mares.
Private owner not engaged in breeding who may occasionally make his/her horse(s) available for breeding.
An owner or manager of an equestrian club where pure- and partbred Akhal-Teke are used in sport.
An owner or trainer of racing Akhal-Teke horses
A professional rider engaged in training the Akhal-Teke.
Private owner engaged in amateur sports with the Akhal-Teke .
A breed enthusiast who does not own AkhalTeke horses.
Who needs an international association – breeders? Owners? Breed enthusiasts? Or all of the above?
Where should an international association be registered – in Russia or outside Russia?
What do you find unsatisfactory about MAAK today?
How do you rate the work of VNIIK today? Do you have any concrete suggestions or comments regarding its work?
What exactly do you not like about the registration system for Akhal-Teke horses today?
What exactly do you not like about the format, contents and process of publication of the General Akhal-Teke Studbook (GPK)?
What do you not like about the system of grading?
What points of Studbook Regulations (Polozhenie) do you disagree with?
How do you envisage the role of VNIIK in the future? Should an international organisation replace it? Cooperate with it? Co-exist with it? Or work independently from it?
I what way should an international organisation differ from MAAK in structure?
What should the remit of an international organisation be?
studbook management;
applications for registration, acceptance of test results and issuance of pedigree papers;
publication of the studbook in paper form;
maintenance of studbook in electronic form;
statistical analysis of breed data;
Evaluation and Grading;
The organising of championships;
The organising of race meetings;
Other activities – please list
What categories of owners and breeders listed above should have the right:
to join an international association;
to have the right to vote on all issues;
to have the right to vote on some issues – please note which ones.
Co-Director of Akhal-Teke UK Ltd
(NOTE: this report is the personal opinion of Maria Marquise Baverstock but the following questionnaire has been approved by Klimuk and Babaev and will be fed back to the Executive Committee so please fill it out if you want to have an input in the formation of the World Akhal-Teke Organization.)
Background
For 3000 years Central Asian nomads engaged in selective horse breeding for speed and stamina, to give the world the oldest known “thoroughbred” horse. They passed down their knowledge of sire lines through oral tradition, bred the best to the best, regarded the horses amongst their most cherished possessions and gave them as gifts to foreign emmisaries.
The diminishing significance of the Silk Route hailed the decline of their traditional customs, and with it, reduced the dependency of the Turkic tribes on their horses. After the annexation by the Russian Empire of the vast stretches of land east of the Caspian Sea, the dwindling horse population was rescued by the Russian colonial administrators. They gathered information from the Turkmen elders and lay the foundations of the modern Akhal-Teke breed by creating a first recorded studbook.
In the Soviet Union of which Turkmenistan became one of the fifteen Socialist Republics, their work was awarded official status and placed in the care of the All-Soviet Institute of Horse Breeding, VNIIK. Seven volumes of the General Akhal-Teke Studbook (GPK) were published between 1941 and 1993. GPK continued to exist after the Soviet Union broke up in the early 1990s when the “All-Soviet Institute” changed name to “All-Russian” (with the acronym VNIIK conveniently not affected by the organisation name change). VNIIK retained control over the studbook, meanwhile a host of momentous events took place which reshaped the “fame and fortune” of the Akhal-Teke breed:
Turkmenistan became an independent nation-state with the largest population of Akhal-Teke horses;
private horse ownership became the backbone of equestrian industry in the former Soviet states, encouraged by the extreme pace of economic growth;
Akhal-Teke horses began to be exported to Europe and US, mostly via Russia;
animal breeding embraced DNA testing and, along with many other spheres of life, entered the internet age.
In recognition of the pace of change, the International Association of Akhal-Teke Breeders was founded in 1994 in Dubna, named MAAK (“M” is for “International” in Russian). Its membership, based on the numbers of purebred mares’ owned, with collective membership also available, was never a pre-requisite to registering a horse into the studbook.
Throughout the 1990s, some countries with sizeable Akhal-Teke population started to maintain their own national registries while other countries found it hard to unite breeders and owners and to come up with a coherent system of breed management.
In 2004 a momentous event took place in France where, out of many years of disagreements, emerged a single, government-approved association which opened a French National Akhal-Teke studbook under an official agreement with VNIIK. The Akhal-Teke breed gained the official recognition in France and for the first time in the French equestrian history, the Akhal-Teke are now allowed to take part in French competitions.
The possibility to work with VNIIK under a “Service Level Agreement” became an attractive proposition for other countries: Switzerland, I believe, is in the process of negotiating such agreement and UK has just signed theirs. Cooperation efforts are not without their problems, as language, distance and lack of time all play their part in frustrating the best of intentions.
These positive developments, however, took place against the backdrop of what is probably the most negative event in the history of the Akhal-Teke breed in the last 100 years: from 2001, Turkmen-born horses ceased to be registered in the GPK. Turkmenistan has a laboratory but it is not ISAG-approved. It is alleged that many horses have been crossed with other breeds, mostly English TB, to increase their success in racing.
21st century also sees the atrophy of MAAK as an institution: it holds no regular meetings, does not publish accounts and does not hold elections. It is alleged by some that MAAK had never really worked properly in the first place, as it was too biased in favour of Russian breeders and had a Turkmen dictator as a bizarre and somewhat offensive figurehead at its helm. Horse registration, breed statistics, regulations and publication of the studbook have continued to be managed by VNIIK, though, oddly enough, a document confirming a horse’s pedigree is issued by VNIIK under the name of MAAK Passport.
Do We Need an International Organisation?
In the light of such complexities born out of a multitude of historical factors, the question posed by the organisers of the Akhal-Teke Breed Management conference at Equiros 2008 “Do we need an international organisation?” is not an easy one to answer.
The stated remit of WATO is to regulate the national studbooks, to promote racing, to organise world championships under a unified system of judging, to educate the public and create investment opportunities. An ambitious remit indeed!
All participants voted “yes” in reply to the key question - “Do we need an international organisation?”, at least judged by the show of hands in an open vote. However, Mr Abdulrahman Osmanov, an eminent surgeon and the owner of many famous horses, including Garayusup, raised the possibility of reforming MAAK. He drew an analogy which likened MAAK to an engine which had never been deployed. “It is idling without fuel. Should fuel be finally added to it?” He also warned against creating more problems than would be solved by starting a new organisation from scratch.
In my mind, his address translates into three basic questions:
Should MAAK be dissolved before WATO is incorporated? (this presupposes that current MAAK members should be consulted).
Where should WATO be incorporated? (arguably, one of the perceived problems of MAAK has always been its bias towards Russia and Russian breeders.)
Who would be making the above decisions? (considering that WATO itself does not exist, as it has not produced a constitution yet and has not been registered)
Studbook Management
The most controversial aspect of WATO’s declared remit is studbook management. The organisers of WATO propose to create an electronic portal to which all horses registered in the national studbooks are entered. It is, at this stage, unclear, whether a horse would always need to be registered in a national studbook prior to entering a central register or whether a direct registration would also be allowed.
The potential attraction of an electronic portal is hard to argue with in this day and age. The opportunity to extract a list of all horses born in a particular year across a range of bloodlines, compare their measurements and gradings, to name but one of the numerous possibilities, is music to my computer-wizened fingers. These possibilities were outlined at the WATO conference by Todd Keith who has long been involved in the work to database GPK. But where does one start from, when all existing records are kept in VNIIK archives and published by them in GPK? A lively discussion took place on what constitutes database copyright, who owns the test results, who should take blood and how does one know that test results belong to a particular horse…
As I leaf through my two precious Soviet-red, hardbound volumes of GPK X, I am awed by the magnitude of effort which must have gone into the compilation of the existing studbook. Yes, I know it has mistakes, yes, it did take ten years to get published, yes, to buy it, one has to use unofficial couriers who pass cash to VNIIK via personal contacts in Moscow. Plus, I hear from those who have been to VNIIK itself (I haven’t) that the filing system is ancient. And still… or maybe precisely because of all this, one cannot but remain cautious about rocking this fragile boat. But, to continue the marine analogy, nor does one wish to deflate the sails on the boat of change!
Change, in this instance, can take place within several different frameworks:
WATO cooperates with VNIIK to reform and modernise the logistics of registration and studbook management, including the creation of electronic portal, while VNIIK retains the ownership of the studbook or…
WATO and VNIIK do not cooperate and WATO starts a new electronic studbook, having to not only build the records from scratch but also gain the credibility of breeders worldwide and persuade them to register horses into the new studbook in preference to GPK.
WATO processes registrations carried out by national studbooks or…
WATO accepts direct registrations, based on test results presented by owners who choose to by-pass their national register.
These are just some of the questions WATO Breeding Committee would need to address.
The most critical question is what happens with the Turkmen horses. There was one Turkmen breeder at the Moscow conference, Ovlyakuli Sharipov. He addressed the audience with an appeal to breeders to “show more trust”:
“If you come to me”, he said, “and I tell you that my horses are pure, what reason do you have to disbelieve me? Yes, of course, in my country there have been instances of purebred horses being bred to non-purebreds, these crosses are mostly used for races or for baiga. But if I say “my horses are pure”, why would you, as a buyer, not believe me?”.
I visited Ovlyakuli in 2000 at his home in Ashkhabad, enjoyed his hospitality… tea and dried fruit at the low table covered with Turkmen tapestries. As I sat in front of the microphone, in Moscow in 2008, translating Ovlyakuli’s words into English, the cultural differences penetrating this breed seemed vast.
What is “International”?
In comparison, the questions surrounding the setting up of a Jockey Club, Education and International Communications Committees don’t seem insurmountable, or do they?
As of today, we still do not have an English translation of the conference minutes expertly recorded in Russian by Nadezhda Tarasova and the Committee nominations in the Russian version of the protocol are slightly different from those in the English summary. The question of translation is a very real one in the context of an international organisation dominated by non-Engish-speaking members. To function effectively, WATO needs a pool of dedicated translators who would agree to commit a set number of hours per week to cope with all the documentation produced by its Committees. As a former professional translator, I cannot over-emphasise the magnitude and the importance of this task. ??But there is even more to international communications than language. As it has now transpired, several breeders did not receive an invitation to the conference. VNIIK did receive an invitation but as this was sent to its Director, rather than to T.N. Ryabova herself, she chose not to attend, despite the efforts of several people, myself included, to persuade her to take part. A representative of the VNIIK IT Department, Mr Podobaev, did attend and made some very interesting and provocative comments, giving a brief account of the history of VNIIK accreditation with Wetherby’s. He expressed surprise that the Akhal-Teke breed is one of the few which are still having issues with studbook management.
It is futile to dwell now on who and why was and was not invited, and to speculate on the possible ulterior motives. What is certain is that a much greater degree of active international involvement is needed if WATO is justify the “W” in its name.
Following the conference, I have drawn a list of questions which can, hopefully, be put to breeders worldwide, to survey their views on the current system and gather their proposals on how they would like to see their breed managed. My personal view is that a survey of opinions should have been conducted prior to the conference and discussions should have been based around its results.
I also felt that open vote for Committee nominations was not appropriate in the circumstances. The protocol recorded a unanimous vote for every candidate which, I felt, was obtained, at least in part, through social pressure. Personally, I found it hard to vote “no” when everyone in the room was raising their hands to say “yes”, especially, as the people for whom we were voting were sitting in the same room. I did valiantly attempt to disrupt the unanimity by registering my friendly voice against Babaev’s nomination to one of the Committees, though which one I can no longer recall. For an odd reason, I cannot seem to find my courageous “no” anywhere in the Russian version of the protocol.
All in all, I left the conference with mixed feelings but I am keenly aware that the easiest stance to take now is to criticise its organisation, to doubt the viability of WATO and the motives of its organisers. Having been unanimously elected to the International Communications Committee, I consider it my duty to involve the widest possible range of interested parties in the WATO initiative.
To this effect, I am attaching below a questionnaire on key issues affecting the Akhal-Teke breeders and owners today. Please fill it out and return to contact@akhaltekeuk.com
The Akhal-Teke Breed Management Conference at Equiros
18 August 2008, Moscow
Additional Questions to Conference Participants and all other interested parties.
A question was put to the participants of the conference: “So we need an international organisation or not?”.
I would like to add several detailed questions and ask conference participants and any other interested parties to reply, so that the new organisation could, in effect, become “international”.
You can reply anonymously but please mark to which category you belong:
Breeder with 10 or more purebred mares
Breeder with 5-10 mares
Private owner who is engaged in breeding on a small scale – less than five mares.
Private owner not engaged in breeding who may occasionally make his/her horse(s) available for breeding.
An owner or manager of an equestrian club where pure- and partbred Akhal-Teke are used in sport.
An owner or trainer of racing Akhal-Teke horses
A professional rider engaged in training the Akhal-Teke.
Private owner engaged in amateur sports with the Akhal-Teke .
A breed enthusiast who does not own AkhalTeke horses.
Who needs an international association – breeders? Owners? Breed enthusiasts? Or all of the above?
Where should an international association be registered – in Russia or outside Russia?
What do you find unsatisfactory about MAAK today?
How do you rate the work of VNIIK today? Do you have any concrete suggestions or comments regarding its work?
What exactly do you not like about the registration system for Akhal-Teke horses today?
What exactly do you not like about the format, contents and process of publication of the General Akhal-Teke Studbook (GPK)?
What do you not like about the system of grading?
What points of Studbook Regulations (Polozhenie) do you disagree with?
How do you envisage the role of VNIIK in the future? Should an international organisation replace it? Cooperate with it? Co-exist with it? Or work independently from it?
I what way should an international organisation differ from MAAK in structure?
What should the remit of an international organisation be?
studbook management;
applications for registration, acceptance of test results and issuance of pedigree papers;
publication of the studbook in paper form;
maintenance of studbook in electronic form;
statistical analysis of breed data;
Evaluation and Grading;
The organising of championships;
The organising of race meetings;
Other activities – please list
What categories of owners and breeders listed above should have the right:
to join an international association;
to have the right to vote on all issues;
to have the right to vote on some issues – please note which ones.