Stalking the Caspian Horse

Back in July, a New Zealand page called Horsetalk ran out an interesting story on a British woman named Pat Bowles and her personal efforts to save and spread a breed of horse re-discovered in the 1960s in Iran and dubbed the Caspian. I missed the piece, and thanks to a horse specialty web page called Simply Marvelous for reprinting it this week.

As the story goes, an American woman named Louise Firouz who had married into Iranian aristocracy found this lilliputian-size horse -- average height about 11.2 hands -- trotting around a place called Amol, about 13 miles south of the Caspian Sea. It turned out that it was a long-lost breed that in past times was used to pull chariots. The locals were using them as work horses.

Firouz set out to save them -- she reckoned there were around fifty at the time -- and now there are well over a thousand around the world. One of the main U.S. breeding centers, the Kristull Caspian Ranch, run by Francie and Chuck Stull in Brenham, Texas, sold its last Caspians (except for two family pets) in September, and the couple retired. But there are other ranches selling them in the U.S., Britain, and elsewhere.

Pat Bowles, the woman profiled in the New Zealand story, is another of the horse's saviors, based in England.