The world has been waiting for this to STOP!

The World Has Been Waiting… The Unveiling Of A King!

By Nakashen Valaitham & Kristi Hopp

Do you believe in love at first sight? Something so magical it takes your breath away, leaves you speechless and captivates your attention? The time to fall in love is now. The wait is over. He was born in the heartland of America, bred by Jack & Elizabeth Milam of Regency Cove Farms in Oklahoma.

El Rey Magnum RCF has arrived.

For breeders, it is love at first sight when newborn foals struggle to their feet and takes those first steps. It is quite overwhelming to watch the birth of an exquisite gift after waiting 11+ plus months.

His name means greatness in Spanish; El Rey translates to “The King.” He had not been around long before The King became the most talked about colt in the world. Having a keen eye for a unique look, and an urge for hidden treasure, when David Boggs first met The King he was captivated. David acquired the colt and eventually brought him to his Midwest Training Center in Scottsdale, AZ.

Soon after that Doug Leadley heard about The King and scheduled a visit. Once he laid eyes on El Rey Magnum RCF, he urged the new owners to acquire this special young colt. “I travel all around and see several impressive young horses but rarely do I see one that stops me in my tracks. I simply could not believe my eyes and what I saw in front of me. Horses like this come by once in a decade. We must preserve Arabian type or we will loose the majestic look the separates us from other breeds.” Doug Leadley

2018 will be an exciting year for El Rey Magnum and the team behind him - he will be ready for his coronation.

WOAHWOAHWOAHWOAHWAAAAAAAIIIITTT!!!

Yes. The world has been waiting, all right - waiting for this sort of genetic abuse to go away.

This is not a horse. It's Michael Jackson. It's My Little Pony (I almost wrote "Phony"). It's an Arabian horse so genetically manipulated  for certain traits that it has become virtually deformed. Yet it's touted as God's gift to horses, the next generation of custom-made equines (and never mind if they can breathe or not).

I write about horses quite a lot, because I love them so, and never get to ride or even come near a horse. But I do know something from my horsy girlhood. And what I know is that THIS AIN'T IT: this isn't the standard for the breed, at all.

The standard is more like this:

This is a great example of the classic Arabian head: broad forehead, big dusky glamorous eyes, slightly concave profile, tapered muzzle and small nose with large nostrils. What is called the throatlatch (where the horse's head attaches to its neck) is quite defined, and the crest (top of the neck) is high and arched. The Arabian head exudes exoticism and gasping loveliness, and for many a little girl an "Arab" is the ideal horse, the horse of their dreams.

Never mind that the actual breed is a little flaky and skittish, a status horse that's not always too dependable to ride. Maybe they've been told they're beautiful once too often.

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time mooning over "Arabs" in my horse books (some of which I still have). The Godolphin Arabian, whose story was fictionalized in Marguerite Henry's King of the Wind, looked something like this:

The Godolphin Arabian was quite literally a prototype, one of the foundational sires of the Thoroughbred horse breed. He was not just an Arab but a Super Arab. But there's no trace of My Little Pony here.

Of course we have no photos of what he really looked like, but since normal horses were being bred to normal horses back then, it's doubtful he looked freakish like poor El Ray Magnum. When his exotic looks were poured together with the war-horse strength and brawn of the horses of the day, magic happened: a sort of genetic explosion which is still echoing down the generations. Take any horse breed, add a dash of Arabian, and voila - you have a brawny or cobby or rangy creature who has the desert horse's beautiful sculpted head and neck, grace in its step and a spark of spirit. It's as if Arabian genes have a long memory.





               Cass Ole, horse actor and star of The Black Stallion


It interests me that of the many dozens of comments on this photo when it appeared on Facebook, probably 85% were negative. These are horse lovers speaking out, and hardly any of them think this look is appealing or even fair to the horse. He's close to having a mono-nostril, for one thing, since the breed's very large nostrils are stuck at the end of a teeny-tiny muzzle. To me, it looks like somebody squeezed his nose with pliers. I think this look is "in" now in the show ring, for some reason, and because human beings always take a good thing and ruin it with extremes, it has likely become a sort of competition to see who can breed the most exaggerated Arabian features.


More has to be better. Right? ( - ??)

Along with the horrid dressage practice of rollkur  - reining the horse's chin to its chest - and "soring" in Tennessee Walker competitions (a painful way of forcing the horse to step so high it looks ridiculous), this extreme inbreeding constitutes a form of abuse. The horse has lost his horseness. 

The fanfare around this Wonder Colt, as if they're unveiling a new Maserati or other fine piece of machinery, is chilling. Behold, a genetic freak! It makes me shudder because this is being promoted by some sort of international Arabian society, clearly more interested in money and status than the wellbeing of the horse (or the breed - you can't tell ME El Rey is the answer to preserving the "majestic look" of the Arabian "type").

So until the situation becomes so grotesque that one of these breeders looks at a newborn foal and keels over in horror, we'll end up with a line of Hapsburg horses which are  more bizarre than beautiful.

(OK, I have leftover pictures, too gorgeous NOT to share!)

Fall of the house of Horse

There's something just a little bit sad, and a little bit mad, about the way I collect horse pictures on the internet.

When I was a kid, I didn't have too many options. I had my horse books, such as King of the Wind (with Wesley Dennis' glorious illustrations of the sun-colored Godolphin Arabian) and the odd rerun of My Friend Flicka or Fury. For a short time I had a horse of my own - and I am sure I did not appreciate it at the time. These are among the sweetest memories I have, so it seems incredible to me that after a while, I lost interest. How stupid we are, or can be, in hindsight.

But the internet opened up whole new vistas of horse porn. When I started collecting photos about five years ago, they were mostly teeny and of poor quality. All that has changed. I mean, look at this thing! It's breathtaking, almost beyond horse.

But I've also noticed some things about horses.

They have changed.

This 1960 painting of an Arabian horse by Wesley Dennis is the standard for the breed. . . or at least, it used to be. I pictured the "Arab" (as little girls called them, thinking of them as the epitome of horsedom) as having a fine, sculpted head sitting on a swanlike but muscular neck. Large dark eyes and flaring nostrils were traits of this ancient desert breed, as were small, pricked ears.

This horse (the cinematic knockout Cass Ole), shown in silhouette in The Black Stallion, reveals ideal Arabian conformation in every sense. Especially that beautifully symmetrical head with its elegant profile.

Even as a horsy little girl, having read every horse book in existence, I knew there was a trait prized by Bedouin horsemen: it was called jibbah, and it referred to the slightly concave, tapering forehead and muzzle of the desert horse. SLIGHTLY, I said, as in the lovely Arabian mare above.

SO. . . WHAT HAPPENED???

This happened.

And this happened.

And THIS happened! AAAAACK!!! 

Somewhere along the line, in the past few decades, the standard of beauty and ideal conformation for the Arabian horse has gone to hell in a shit-basket.

The glorious and dignified desert steed has come to resemble something more like My Little Pony.

We now have a horse with a pig-snout: a muzzle that looks squeezed, with very large nostrils that have almost formed a mono-nostril (because there's simply no room for them at the end of that tiny nose), and black eyes that look something like an alien's. The show ring is behind a lot of this mutation/mutilation, with handlers applying eyeliner or even tattooing the horse's eyelids to give them that dark and sultry look.

But most of it is breeding. Bad breeding, to exaggerate traits that someone must have decided are quintessentially Arabian. The result is creatures which look disturbingly alike, like the Hapsburgs when their genetic house of cards finally collapsed. No one seems to see this ugliness any more, and horsy Facebook pages draw oooohs and ahhhhs in the comments section for the most horribly distorted photos of Arabians, their heads flung up unnaturally high and their eyes flashing because their handler just jerked the hell out of the lead.

BUT!!!

That's not why I'm writing this.

I'm writing this because the other day I came across this photo:

Hell-llo, I thought. In fact, I think I said it out loud.

It looked strange. It looked like the puzzle piece that might fit together with the grotesque Arabian "dished" face.

It wasn't just the exaggerated Roman nose, but the eyes, which had an exotic almond shape that gave the horse a "knowing" look. Unless we're talking about locating the feed bucket, most horses aren't particularly knowing.

It was eerie. What sort of horse was this?

It definitely wasn't a draft horse. It just didn't have the look of one. A Clydesdale or Percheron has the same sort of nose, but it belongs on a massive head and neck. This just looked strange.

When I looked it up, I was even more puzzled.

It's one of these.

An Andalusian  (and oh God, how I love that name! Say it again: Andalusian). It's a very ancient breed of Spanish horse, but a horse of a very different shape and size. You can instantly see that the neck is thicker, the body longer and more muscular than the Arabian's. The legs are more like a thoroughbred's. And the head is noble, with a curious convex curve that is the opposite of jibbah: what shall we call it - habbij? 

The Lusitano (another fall-over-backwards-gorgeous name) originated in Portugal, and a horse person would kill me for saying this, but they're pretty similar. So you have horses like this, magnificent steeds which resemble all those old paintings and sculptures of war horses. They're so different from Arabians - or even Morgans or Quarter horses or Saddlebreds or ANY of the breeds which originated from Arabian stock - that it's hard to know what to make of them. How did a saddle horse get a head like that?

But here's where we start to get in trouble. Something about this horse's head isn't quite right. He looks inbred to me - though, of course, a lot of highly-bred horses are. It comes with the territory. But that convex head is as weird-looking as the Hapsburg lip. The eyes are almost squinty. Could it be that the breed's more distinctive traits are being deliberately exaggerated, for the sake of the show ring and the auction block?

Is this what makes a Lusitano a Lusitano?

I hate to see it, because at their finest these are such beautiful horses. But this is not beautiful. This is deformity, not unlike the toy-like Arabians which have lost all their dignity through human manipulation. 

No more horse lies! "From the horse's mouth" means telling the truth. And these poor creatures, through no fault of their own, are paying through the nose.

Blogger's afterthought. It's sad, some of the things you see. There are zillions of YouTube videos of horses, including Arabians bucking and prancing around. They are beautiful to watch. Here's a tiny clip:

The resemblance to Cass Ole is just astounding, even in the way he moves. It's just possible the two are related. But what dismayed me were the comments:

"That's not an Arabian."

"No way, don't try to fool us."

"You trying pass this off as a Arab?"

"Look at the head, it's Quarter horse or a Morgan."

"Arab have deer head, not? This horse has no."

Yes. The "deer head" with the tiny squashed nose has now become the standard, so that a magnificent horse like this one is somehow "wrong".

My hope is that not all Arabians look like this. But the fact that ANY of them do dismays me, particularly since this sort of extreme breeding seems to be done to please the public.

I would be pleased by this. And thank you.

"Don't give me none of your lip" - THE MOVIE!

It's been a while since I visited that genealogical house of horrors, the Hapsburg Dynasty, which came to a screaming halt with the birth of King Charles II of Spain. He had so many deformities and came from such hopelessly twisted bloodlines that he was, without doubt, his own Grandpa, if not uncle, nephew, brother, cousin, and (quite possibly) great-aunt.

When I found these gifs, I nearly did cartwheels. They're so beautifully done, and so very creepy! I can't describe all the genetic horrors that left the Hapsburg DNA looking like the hideously twisted metal of a smoking car wreck. But I have noticed before that in their portraits, which are supposed to be flattering, they all look disturbingly alike. And some of them are just plain plug-ugly. These portraits were often used as calling-cards/Instagram photos to cement marriage agreements, in which case the Hapsburgs must have been blind as well as deformed.

I wish I had the talent to do things like this! Go on Michelle Vaughan's site for more.

http://michellevaughan.net/gifs





Emperor Leopold I and Margarita Teresa of Spain; uncle and niece, husband and wife






Emperor Leopold I and King Charles II; uncle and nephew, brothers-in-law






Infanta Maria Teresa and Infanta Margarita Teresa; half-sisters, second cousins






Infanta Maria Teresa and Queen Mariana; first cousins, step mother and step daughter






Infanta Margarita Teresa and King Charles II; sister and brother






Maria Anna of Spain and Queen Mariana; mother and daughter






Queen Mariana and Emperor Leopold I; sister and brother






King Philip IV and Queen Mariana; uncle and niece, husband and wife






King Philip IV and Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand; brothers






King Philip IV and Maria Anna of Spain; brother and sister


Habsburgs as GIFs

Here is a collection of portraits commissioned by the Habsburg court in Spain and Austria during the 17th century. Diego Velázquez was the primary court painter for King Philip IV (1605-1665); and his apprentices, Juan Carreño de Miranda and Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, followed after his death. In Austria, the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, sat for court artists such as Guido Cagnacci, Benjamin Von Block and Jan Thomas. These portraits had many different purposes during this time: to be displayed as powerful symbols; used as political propaganda; or to be given to family members, neighboring courts, and the families of potential spouses.

The Habsburgs often exchanged portraits to arrange their marriages, and many unions were first cousins. This particular family line had extremely high levels of inbreeding – there were two sequential uncle-niece marriages. As a result, their inbreeding coefficient numbers sometimes ranged higher than offspring produced by a brother and sister.

With animated GIFs, we can examine the Habsburgs’ iconography and physiognomy. The Spanish and Austrian royals look so similar that sometimes art historians cannot tell them apart. This series is part of a larger project examining the history, art history and genetics of the Spanish Habsburgs.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Don't give me none of your lip: the freaky demise of the Hapsburg Dynasty

If this guy looks freaky enough to scare the Elephant Man, that's because he is.

He represents one of the biggest genetic train wrecks in human history.

How do I get on to these things, for heaven's sake? I saw a photo of Queen Elizabeth II on the cover of Macleans, a national newsmagazine in Canada. She's on her semi-regular Royal Tour, causing very elderly ladies wearing hats with veils to totter out to the edge of the sidewalk while Liz does her indolent royal wave.

All these people, these royals, and I mean royals all over the damn world, are interrelated. It's scary, but they were bred like horses back then, bred for stamina and aggression and militancy and all those desirable traits.

What stunned me, in looking at the rather hideous cover pic of the Queen in her typical mauve polyester suit and gigantic frothy hat, was how much she is starting to look like her husband, Prince Phillip.

It's bad enough that Prince Charles now displays all the worst attributes of both his parents: long horsey face, thin sharp nose, bad teeth, and eyes set too close together. And worse somehow, that William and Harry, who used to have so much glamour and seemed to have broken the family curse for ugliness, are already starting to look too royal for comfort. Even Harry, long rumoured to be the offspring of Diana's illicit affair with her riding instructor, has the long razor nose, the close-set eyes and the vulpine Windsor smile.

OK then, this is a very long way around my topic. In googling around to get more info on royal intermarriage, I struck pay dirt: an article in a New Zealand newspaper called "The inbreeding that ruined the Hapsburgs".

"The Hapsburg dynasty (more correctly spelled Habsburg, but that's too hard to pronounce) was one of the most important and influential royal families in Europe dating back more than 500 years and producing rulers in Austria, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands and the German Empire."

These people might as well have all lived in one country. They were their own brothers and sisters. Generation upon generation of harrowingly close genetic unions gradually produced a host of medical problems, but since nobody knew what the fuck was going on, the political alliances based on blood continued, until. . .

Until Charles II of Spain, a monstrous bundle of mistakes who limped through a short life, unable to reproduce because he didn't know one end from the other. Fortunately, he was the end of the line for the Hapsburgs in Spain.

This guy lived around 1700, when every malformation was seen as demonic. And boy, was this guy demonic. Even royal portaits like the one above (and remember that these portraits had to be flattering, or the artist would literally lose his head) revealed a freakish person with a huge head, jutting jaw, small insectoid eyes, and what became known in history as the "Hapsburg lip".

This has nothing to do with back-sass, or even lips, but the extreme forward set of the jaw, so extreme in poor Charlie's case that he could barely talk and couldn't chew his food. It went well beyond the typical Hapsburg "power pout" which until that point was seen as a mark of distinction (sort of). His development was so retarded that he couldn't speak until he was four, couldn't walk until age 8, and remained what was then called an imbecile, barely aware of his surroundings. He was kept in a sort of pupa for a few decades in the feverish hope that he would produce an heir. The relentless and horrific centuries-long mass of genetic deformities finally collapsed like a row of dominoes. Charles turned out to be the last of the Spanish line.

Scientists have tried to figure out his "inbreeding coefficient" and all that jazz, but suffice it to say it was ten times normal. Like the song says, he was his own grandpa:

"Charles' father, Philip IV, was the uncle of his mother, Mariana of Austria; his great-grandfather, Philip II, was also the uncle of his great-grandmother, Anna of Austria; and his grandmother, Maria Anna of Austria, was simultaneously his aunt."

Whew.

It would have benefited the poisoned gene pool of this dynasty to introduce the blood of some commoners, but they wouldn't have it. Convinced that interbreeding was the road to greatness, they manipulated alliances between uncles and nieces and cousins and half-siblings  (who must've started reproducing at 12), ignoring the fact that all these folk were beginning to look mighty peculiar.Not to mention similar.

Jay Leno had nothing on them. One of Charles' ancestors, Leopold I,  was nicknamed Hogmouth. They were ugly. I mean uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-gly.

All this is odd, when you think about it. Through most of human history, people lived in little villages and never went anywhere. Inbreeding was a certainty, so why didn't the race die out like poor, impotent, imbecilic, drooling Charlie?

Is this the real reason why famous explorers struck out, going to ludicrous extremes and taking risks that only a madman would take?

I have often wondered if the explorers we know about, Cortez and Champlain and all dem guys, only represent the tip of the iceberg, the more-or-less successful ones who then established colonies in the New World. How many tried and failed, and never made it into the history books?

Lots, probably. But something in their genetic code was saying, "Get out, get out! Get OUT of here before you end up with a chin you can set your coffee cup on."

Genealogy and mitochondrial DNA testing is all the rage now, with people anxious to find out they're related to Ben Franklin and Joan of Arc and such. Nobody wants Joe Blow the average schlub as the patriarch of their lineage, but in most cases it's probably true.

We can rest easy, however, in that none of us is related to Charles II, whose DNA coils were as damaged as a Slinky that's been run over by a Mack truck.

NOTE. This is a summer repeat, cuzzadafact I don't feel like writing today - hey, summer's half over and I want to go buy some watermelon. I've also added a lot more illustrations: my blog was limited when I began, or perhaps ***I*** was, and didn't know how to manage photos. But this is a topic worth revisiting for its extreme icky-squicky factor. What's so astonishing is the ignorance of the people involved, the way they kept on relentlessly boinking their ever-closer relatives and producing children ever-more-ugly-and-enfeebled. Finally the problem solved itself when the last of the male line collapsed in a heap of genetic mistakes.

Fun stuff for a summer's day. Eh?

And here's a bonus, gleaned from some-site-or-other, one of those Really Pompous Historical Ones:

"Charles II is known in Spanish history as El Hechizado ("The Bewitched") from the popular belief - to which Charles himself subscribed - that his physical and mental disabilities were caused by "sorcery" rather than the much more likely cause: centuries of inbreeding within the Habsburg dynasty (in which first cousin and uncle/niece matches were commonly used to preserve a prosperous family's hold on its multifarious territories). Charles' own immediate pedigree was exceptionally populated with nieces giving birth to children of their uncles: Charles' mother was niece of Charles' father, being daughter of Maria Anna of Spain (1606-46) and Emperor Ferdinand III. Thus, Empress Maria Anna was simultaneously his aunt and grandmother."


"Still, the king was exorcised, and the exorcists of the kingdom were called upon to put straight questions to the devils they cast out. His great-great-great grandmother, Joanna the Mad, mother of the Spanish King Charles I who was also Holy Roman Emperor Charles V - became completely insane early in life; the fear of a taint of insanity ran through the Habsburgs. Charles descended from Joanna a total of 14 times - twice as a great-great-great grandson, and 12 times further..."


"Towards the end of his life Charles became increasingly hypersensitive and strange, at one point demanding that the bodies of his family be exhumed so he could look upon the corpses. He reportedly wept upon viewing the body of his first wife, Marie Louise."

(I'd cry too.)

UPDATE! I just received a tip-off from a reader about the Crown Princess of Sweden, who is looking suspiciously Hapsburg-y in the chin area. Well, I looked her up, and my God. . . 

Pray for her children.