Akhal Teke UK
©Black Fox 2007-2008
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The Akhal-Teke Breed Management Conference at Eqiuros 2008
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
Maria Marquise Baverstock
Co-Director of Akhal-Teke UK Ltd
Download the questionnaire to express your views
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
Maria Marquise Baverstock
Co-Director of Akhal-Teke UK Ltd
Download the questionnaire to express your views