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North African Mystery
continued
by Sir Terence Clark
I was interested to learn that my article exploring the
disappearance of the feathered Sloughi from North Africa had
attracted comment from Dr Fritzsch of the Sloughi Fanciers’
Association of America, but I was disappointed that it throws
little light on the mystery that I described and in some
respects serves only to deepen it.
First I was puzzled to read his assertion that ‘the Sloughi is
the hound of the Berbers and the Saluki that of the Bedouins’.
If he means by this that the Sloughi and the Saluki exist in
parallel in North Africa with the Berber and Arab communities
respectively, then I would be very surprised, as I am not aware
that anyone has previously made such a distinction. Indeed the
historical evidence suggests the contrary. As the Columbian
Encyclopedia (6th edition) makes clear, ‘the Berbers
of the plains were absorbed by the Arabs, while those who lived
in the mountain regions such as the Aurès, Kabylia and the Atlas
retained their culture and warlike traditions’. Anyone who knows
the Atlas would recognise immediately that these Berber-held
mountains are not the best place for smooth-haired Sighthounds
for hunting but rather for large, hairy guard dogs for
protection; whereas the warmer and flatter plains and the desert
inhabited largely by the Arabs are clearly more suitable for
Sighthounds. This is what I think Max Siber meant, when he said:
‘the breed of the feathered Sloughi that is widespread in the
whole of the Maghrib and in Morocco, namely with the Arabs
(my emphasis thoughout) in the southwest of Beled-el-Machsin is
not found among the Berbers. These animals are often used by the
Arabs for hunting with falcons.’ Siber added that the
only type of dog of the Berbers ‘is a village watchdog of no
recognisable breed’. He would seem to say that they did not have
Sloughis of any description.
I have looked through many of the reliable French sources on the
Sloughi in North Africa and cannot find any references to these
hounds being exclusively Berber; whereas there is general
recognition of them as Arab hounds. I list some of these
sources:
Bédon, G
–Contribution à l’étude du sloughi (1974)
Daumas, E–
Les chevaux du Sahara (1851)
Duconte –
Le Slougui ou lévrier arabe (1973)
Grunheid,
JL – articles in ‘Vos Chiens’, No. 41 of May 1988 and No. 74 of
February 1991
Giudicelli,
B – Situation actuelle du sloughi en Algérie (1975)
Mégnin, P –
Le Slougui (1957)
Mercier, L
– La chasse et les sports chez les arabes (1927)
Przezdziecki, X – Le Destin des Lévriers (1980s)
Villemont,
M - Le lévrier arabe ou le slougui (1970)
The Moroccan veterinarian Dr Ali Miguil, who
wrote his exhaustive study ‘Contribution à l’étude du Slougui au
Maroc’ as recently as 1986, makes no mention of it being a
Berber hound, even though he is himself a Berber. On the
contrary most of the references are to the Arabs’ use of the
Sloughi. He does however quote some Berber idioms from the Atlas
and the South which mention the Oskai and a Berber word
Azgagh for red sable used around Fes, which suggest, as
you might expect in a country with a mixed population, that both
communities are familiar with this hound.
Among the English sources, the Hon. Florence Amherst, a
recognised authority on Oriental Sighthounds, likewise makes no
mention of the Sloughi, both smooth and feathered, as being a
Berber hound. On the contrary in her book ‘Oriental Greyhounds’,
she writes: ‘The Slughi in North Africa is of the same type as
the smooth Slughi further east, and is said to be of the same
Arabian origin, though it now forms a distinct variety.
These Greyhounds are highly valued by the sporting Beys of
Algiers, Tunis and elsewhere and the Bedawin of the Sahara…The
feathered variety is also occasionally met with in North
Africa’.
All the breeders that I have met in Tunisia
and Morocco were Arabs and some claimed descent from the Bani
Hilal tribe that came from Arabia to occupy parts of North
Africa; and the fact is that the peoples of North Africa have
chosen to use for their hunting hound the colloquial Arabic
word ‘Sloughi’, derived from classical Arabic Salūqī,
rather than a Berber word such as Oskai, which would
have been more logical if it were indeed a Berber hound.
(Incidentally, I suggest that Dr Fritzsch
should take a look at any paintings of the Orientalist school,
of which Gaston Casimir Saint-Pierre (1833-1916) was a member,
as he would see immediately that the Arab boy depicted in
Saint-Pierre’s painting in Siber’s book is dressed in the style
of that period for North Africa. Saint-Pierre’s parents lived in
Oran, Algeria and I think he would have been in a better
position to know how a person from North Africa might have
looked.)
Dr Fritzsch says that he was dumbfounded that in all the serious
books that he has read about North Africa and the Sloughi,
nothing about the disappearance of the feathered variety was
ever mentioned. I can only say that he clearly had not read
sufficiently widely or attentively. If he had, his curiosity
might have been aroused as mine was when I came across the
puzzling references to the existence of the feathered variety in
the serious works of Amherst, Belgrave, Siber, Przezdziecki and
Miguil and the Saint-Pierre painting, but I could find nothing
to explain satisfactorily what had happened to it. This is
certainly not ‘an obsession’ on my part, as Dr Frtizsch asserts,
but an entirely natural response from anyone with an enquiring
mind on seeing such references. Indeed I might equally question
the motives of all those who must surely have read at least the
Amherst reference but have never thought fit to explore it.
I was hoping to learn from the response of Dr Fritzsch, as a
‘heavyweight’ biologist according to Dr de Caprona, some
scientific explanation for this phenomenon, but his
argumentation against the very tentative theory that I posited
for the elimination of the feathered variety fails at the very
first hurdle. He begins by taking as a basis for the population
of Sloughis in North Africa at the end of the 19th
century the figure of 210 that I was given for the population of
purebred Sloughis in Morocco in 1970 and extrapolates from that
a figure of 1,000 for the whole of North Africa, of which he
says half might have been feathered more than 70 years earlier!
I know of no foundation for such an extraordinary leap of the
imagination. As I said in my initial article, it is believed
that the whole Sloughi population went into decline after 1844
as a result of a ban on hunting game with hounds imposed by the
French colonialists and the effect of severe droughts on the
desert pastoralists, but I have seen no information on the
actual number of purebred hounds of either variety extant at the
end of the 19th century. To speculate on numbers in
such uncertain circumstances is totally unscientific. But by
analogy with the hunting hounds in similar climatic conditions
further east, all I can say is that, however many hounds there
were at that time, it is probable that the percentage of smooths
was far higher than the 50-50 split suggested by Dr Fritzsch.
Unlike Mendel working on a hypothesis on peas in the quiet of a
monastery garden and producing a neat textbook solution on
heredity (when I was at school and studied Mendel we
experimented with black and white mice in a controlled
environment), we are dealing here with the real world. In my
experience Arab breeders in the Middle East would not accept for
their hounds the degree of close inbreeding implicit in Mendel’s
laws in order to arrive at a particular type of hound but would
seek diversity from within the phenotype based on performance
and would breed smooths and feathereds indiscriminately, unless
there was a particular reason for not doing so. An experienced
breeder in northern Iraq once told me, for example, he would
never breed his smooth hounds with feathereds, which he regarded
as impure imports to the area, and he would cull rigorously any
puppies showing signs of featheriness. I speculated in my
original article that there might have been some similar
cultural reason, possibly western inspired, to lead the North
African breeders to take similar measures, but I could find no
convincing explanation in any of my discussions on the subject
in Morocco or Tunisia or in works of reference.
Dr Fritzsch asks whether the feathering gene
could have been diluted out by crossing non-carriers with
carriers, but treats the possibility as unlikely. It is known
however that the French introduced Greyhound racing to Algiers
and, if the practice in other countries is any guide, many of
these would have wound up in the hands of the local hunters for
crossing with their indigenous hounds. This would have been
further compounded when racing came to an end altogether and
large numbers came available. Their impact has not, as far as I
know, been studied, but it could possibly have provided
something of a boost for the smooth factor in the local
population there.
Dr Fritzsch thought I should have bounced my
ideas off someone more familiar with genetics. I did of course
do that and they were not nearly as dismissive but showed a
proper scientific interest in what other factors might have been
involved to bring about such a rapid disappearance of the
feathered variety. Thinking further on this puzzle, I wondered
whether the effect of the French law of 1844 might indeed hold
the key. In Oman, a similarly draconian law banning all forms of
hunting was introduced in 1976 with the result that by the early
1990s I could find only one native Omani Saluki in the country:
all the hounds of the tribes with which Wilfred Thesiger had
hunted with Salukis and falcons in the late 1940s had been
destroyed or turned loose to fend for themselves. It is known
that the Department of Water and Forests (Eaux et Forêts) in the
French controlled parts of North Africa often acted vigorously
to suppress the local Sloughis and, if the number of the
feathered variety was in any case lower than that of the smooth,
the effect on the feathereds would have had a proportionately
greater impact.
However I have just reread the thorough study
by Bernard Giudicelli on the situation in Algeria about 30 years
ago and came across two other important factors: the gun and
rabies. As he says, the nomads found that the gun was more rapid
and effective than their Sloughis for hunting or protection, so
they had less need for their hounds. More importantly, he says
(in my translation): ‘As for rabies, it has literally decimated
the canine population of North Africa’. As an example of the
effect on the Sloughi population he writes: ’We have read in the
literature that there were a lot of Sloughis in the South-East
of Algeria. One of our friends, secretary-general of the French
Sloughi Club, went there and found with difficulty two Sloughis
of mediocre conformation’. He goes on to say: ’We have had the
occasion to speak with French people who have lived for a long
time in this region: they confirmed the fact that there were a
lot of Sloughis and that the majority had died of rabies or had
been culled’. Rabies and other fatal canine diseases are endemic
across North Africa, so it is possible therefore that the answer
to the mystery is to be found here: the numerically fewer
feathered hounds may have been wiped out by disease.
As I said earlier, it will indeed be
interesting to see whether Dr Savolainen’s research sheds light
on this and other related questions. In the meantime we have to
be patient and wait for the research to be published. However,
if, as Xavier Przezdziecki maintains, by the 1940s the Sloughi
of the coastal regions away from the desert was ‘in a state of
abandonment’ as a result of crossbreeding in a way that the
Saluki further east was not, it will not be at all surprising if
the genetic background will show some divergence.
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