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Sabbah, emerged a heroine. Weighing little more
than 800 pounds, she carried 189 pounds, finishing the half distance in 1
hour 16 minutes in the mud, and walking the second lap so as not to finish
ahead of the 3-hour minimum. Her head and tail were always up and she
never took a deep breath. George Cason was in the saddle." *Bint Bint Sabbah is dam of three
producers of National winners.
All but three of *Bint Bint Sabbah's 13 foals were sired by *Fadl.
Those three were fillies sired by Fay-El-Dine. Two of those died without
progeny, Fay Nefous and Fay Selma. The third was the infamous Fay
Sabbah.
Why did Walter seek the blood of these four
horses as the basic building blocks for his program? What was it that enabled this
combination to produce the Masada look we all know and appreciate
today? Of course breeding is
not a science but there was a method to his madness. Faddan and Fay-El-Dine were both
Saqlawi-Jidran in strain, but
you can’t just paper breed.
These two stallions also exemplified the Saqlawi type. *Bint Bint Durra and *Bint Bint
Sabbah were both Dahmah-Shahwaniyah in strain and
type. As Walter explains, incorporating the Saqlawi type brings length back to
neck and leg, which can be lost with intense use of Dahman and Kuhaylan strain types. It also yields finer bone
structure and produces flatter and less prominent muscling. Too much Saqlawi can produce a long
back and ears. Dahman type brings back an overall
balance and harmony, including more dished heads and larger eyes, and
shorter backs, but also has the tendency to produce shorter necks and
legs, heavier muscling, and more bone. Walter has clearly taught the need
to keep blending the Saqlawi
and Dahman strains, and his
method is to use Saqlawi type stallions on top and Dahmah mares on the
bottom.
The first straight Egyptian stallion used
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Masada was Saafaddan. Saafaddan was a rich mahogany
bay straight Babson, Dahman-Shahwan in strain, but with
many Saqlawi characteristics.
He was bred by another great breeder, Mrs. J.E. Ott, and was
purchased from Bob Cowling.
Saafaddan was by Faddan and out of Saaba. “He was magic when he moved, just
like his sire,” recalls Walter.
“When Saafaddan put on a show, it would take your breath away. He was not tall, not especially
leggy, but perfectly balanced with an elegant neck that could move like a
cobra. He could have had a
better eye (no horse is perfect after all) but what a wonderful angle to
the croup and hip, and he moved like no other horse: elastic, elevated and
with unbelievable suspension.”
Walter always describes Saafaddan as “very much the teenager all
his life”. Walter
recalls that Saafaddan had a typical loving, tractable, gentle Babson
disposition except when it came to his rival Lothar. “Saafaddan used to spend a good
deal of his time tearing down the fences between the stallion paddocks to
decimate Lothar. Strange to
tell though, nothing bloody ever came to pass of their mixing. This was probably because Lothar
very sensibly decided to retreat into his stall and ‘leave the field’ to
Saafaddan for grazing.
Fundamentally, Saafaddan was all show and didn’t have a mean bone
in his body.”
First
glance suggests that breeding Saafaddan to Daal Aba followed the Bedouin
formula: “Let the sire of the sire be the grandsire of the dam.” This careless application of ab uno disco omnes (from one
example learn all) traps most of us into the faulty generalization that
this Bedouin breeding adage is sufficient. To end the study of Daal Aba’s
pedigree there is to miss the sheer brilliance of this breeding and really
learn from it. The beauty is
fully appreciated only by realizing that Saaba was a Fay-el-Dine daughter
out of Fa-Habba (*Fadl x *Bint Bint Sabbah) and thus a full-blooded sister
to Daal Aba’s dam Fay El Aba. Breeding Daal Aba to Saafaddan yielded foals
with 37.5% Faddan blood and 31.25% Fay-El-Dine blood. Walter repeated this breeding 4
times before Saafaddan’s untimely death in 1976. After an eight-year wait, the
first foal born was in 1972, a bay filly named Masada Saadurra, and she
marked the beginning of the Masada program. “She died later that year, around
5 months old, from a bad liver,” remembers Walter. “I just sat there,
holding her head in my lap, stroking her gently and crying. An hour after
she died I still sat there holding her, completely numb and of course
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