Louise Firouz
Louise Firouz was an American-born, Iranian horse breeder and researcher. As a member of the Iranian Royal family and an Iranian princess, she is known as "Iran's lady of horses".
Firouz specialized on Caspian horses and she was one of the main horse breeders in Iran. The Caspian horse is a breed of horse which was once believed to be extinct. Firouz was instrumental in reviving this species.
She died in 2008 in Gonbad. She lived more than half a century in northern Iran.
Rediscovery of the Caspian Horse - 1965
In the late 1950s Louise Laylin Firouz, and her husband Narcy, had established a riding academy in Tehran, the capital city of Iran, called the Norouzabad Equestrian Center.
This was a favorite hang out for children of the well-off families living in Iran. Unfortunately, the Arabian and Turkoman stallions, typically ridden in that part of the world, were not always appropriate for her small charges and upon hearing of small horse-like ponies in the Elburz mountains near the Caspian Sea, she chose to investigate the rumors.
In 1965 Louise Firouz set out on a horseback expedition with some female companions to the mountainous regions south of the Caspian Sea. There she discovered small horses both in wild bands and domesticated individuals that were used by the local people to work the fields and pull their carts. Although many of the domestic ones were malnourished and covered with ticks, there was no mistaking the distinctive characteristics that resembled the small horses depicted on ancient Persian friezes and seals—animals long thought extinct.
Louise Firouz: horse breeder who discovered the Caspian horse Breeder who helped to preserve the rare Caspian horse of the Elburz Mountains as a mount for children
In looking for small ponies suitable for children to ride, Louise Firouz made, in a mountainous region of northern Iran, one of the most important equestrian discoveries of recent decades — the Caspian horse, a breed believed to be the ancestor of the Arab and other types of what are called “hot-blooded” (agile and spirited) horses, and thought to have been extinct for 1,300 years.
Fascinated by the find, and alarmed by how few of the horses were left, she established a breeding herd near Tehran, and it is thanks to her efforts — sustained even throughout the dangerous political strife of the 1970s and 1980s — that the horse now exists in sustainable numbers in several countries worldwide, including Australia, America, New Zealand and Britain.
Louise Elizabeth Laylin was born in Washington. Her father, a lawyer, owned a farm at Great Falls, Virginia, and she hoped to become a vet, but she failed her physics course and studied classics and English at Cornell University instead.
She spent a year of her studies at the American university in Beirut, and visited Iran, where she met Narcy Firouz, a civil engineer, who was descended from the Qajar dynasty that ruled Iran from 1779 to 1925. They were married in 1957 and settled in Shiraz, where they lived in great style — never, she later remembered, hosting lunches for fewer than 30 people.
Among their regular guests were the historian of Persian art Arthur Upham Pope and Kermit Roosevelt Jr, who had masterminded the CIA’s Operation Ajax, which resulted in the overthrow of the Government of the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq in 1953.
Firouz set up the Norouzabad Equestrian Centre, and when she heard that there were small ponies in the mountains near the Caspian Sea she decided to look for them, braving even the most remote areas on horseback.
In Amol she came across a bay stallion that was like nothing she had ever seen or read about: it was small, slight and finely proportioned, like an Arab horse in miniature, and had large protruding eyes, large nostrils, a prominent jaw, a dished face (curving inwards slightly) and a high-set tail. She soon found others, many in poor condition, but she was struck by their resemblance to the horses depicted on the rock relief carvings of the ancient Persian capital Persepolis. DNA testing carried out at the University of Kentucky’s Horse Genome Project in 1990s revealed a direct link to them and to the horses of Ancient Egypt.
Firouz bought three of the Caspian horses, overworked domesticated animals, and took them back with her. “Rest and good feeding produced immediate results, and gentle treatment soon overcame their initial suspicions and fears,” she wrote in 1966. “They became affectionate and interested companions for children, and delightful rides. They are built to carry the weight of a child with the gait of a horse, and, except at full gallop, the speed of a horse, as I have established at our farm in Tehran. They could, in fact, become the perfect children’s ponies, if steps were taken to preserve the breed, which, I fear, is in serious danger of extinction.”
When Firouz estimated that there were only 50 Caspian horses along the whole southern coast of the Caspian Sea — about 30 of those occupying an area of 2,000 square miles (5,200 km2) between Amol, Babol and Kiakola in the Elburz Mountains — she acquired six stallions and seven mares and founded a breeding herd. At first she and her husband financed it themselves, but in 1970 a Royal Horse Society (RHS) was formed, with the Crown Prince, Prince Reza Pahlavi, as its patron, to protect and maintain Iran’s native breeds, and it bought all Firouz’s Caspians, by then numbering 23.
Between 1971 and 1976 Firouz — encouraged by the Duke of Edinburgh, who took a great interest in the Caspian breed after visiting the Royal Horse Society — exported to Europe some 26 Caspian horses of different bloodlines; these constituted the European Formation Herd. In 1974 the RHS took complete control of Firouz’s remaining horses.
Things began to become difficult for her when she started another herd in Ghara Tappeh Sheihk near the Turkmenistan border. Two mares and a foal were killed by wolves, and she arranged for eight horses to be exported to Britain. The RHS was angered by this, and in 1977 ordered her to hand over all but one of her horses. The society banned the export of Caspian horses and collected all those remaining in Iran, many of which were eventually auctioned for use as beasts of burden or meat.
After the Iranian revolution of 1979 the Firouzes were arrested and imprisoned, Narcy for six months and Louise for a few weeks, and much of their fortune was confiscated. Firouz had to sell her silver and jewels to feed her family during this time, but she gradually rebuilt her life, and was eventually able to establish a new herd of Caspian and Turkoman horses.
The British Caspian Trust, which had evolved from the Caspian Stud UK, original recipient of some of her Iran-bred horses, played an important role in the breed’s survival, keeping detailed records of horses and preventing inbreeding by advocating the “cyclic crossing” method whereby each foundation mare was bred to a different foundation stallion. There are now more than 1,000 breeding animals outside Iran.
In her last years Firouz took tourists on treks into the forests and mountains. Her husband died in 1994. She is survived by a son and two daughters.
Louise Firouz, Iranian horse breeder, was born on December 24, 1933. She died on May 25, 2008, aged 74
Born Washington DC 24 December 1933 – Died NE Iran 25 May 2008
"And as I was riding along, my heart resounded in the lawn-dampened steps, resounded in the snorting and champing on the bit by my grey, and a blissful happiness lit up my heart and I knew: If I now dropped out of the world, I would fall into heaven." Baron von Munchhausen
Louise Firouz
Louise Firouz was the sort of person who was able to relate fully to anyone in any walk of life and make them feel special. She was much loved by all who knew her.
Louise Firouz, née Laylin, was a phenomenon; a charming, intelligent, adventurous, American woman, who married a Persian Prince from the Kajar dynasty. Her courage and amazing energy enabled her, against all odds, to discover and re-establish the original Oriental horse, at the same time pursuing its history, running a large riding school and raising a family through revolution, war and intrigue.
She devoted her life to the preservation of all Oriental horse breeds.
Her love for her eventual resting place at Ghara Tepe Sheik in north eastern Iran was moulded around her childhood:
“I was brought up on a farm in Virginia. This was before the days of beltways and asphalt roads leading into the wilderness of the Virginia countryside so that when it became time for my two brothers and me to go to school we rode horses to the two room red brick school house. In fine weather, especially in the autumn when the chincopin nuts were ripe we found it hard to abandon the horses so instead we abandoned school along with similarly inclined friends also mounted and sped towards the Potomac river and its heavily forested banks. We spent the days swimming and speculating what we would do with the rest of our indolent lives.
As the second world war was in full swing no one paid attention to our lack of reading or writing skills. As long as we were up in time to milk the cows, make sandwiches for lunch and were off on the horses in the direction of school our Mother was too pre-occupied with her war work to notice our pristine exercise books. To this day, even with a college degree, I cannot write long hand but continue to print.
Eventually our parents divorced and after a short, unhappy for me, stint in New York City my Mother bought a small farm in New Hampshire. Our farm was ten miles away on a dirt road with nothing else in sight except pastures, forest and deer. My brothers, John and David, were sent off to boarding school while I was enrolled in the local grammar school. At first, when the weather was fine, my Mother drove me to school but when the snows started we were stuck. We bought a small Morgan mare, a sleigh and a buggy and this was our transportation. Getting up in the dark each morning to hitch up the mare and drive the ten miles to school has given me a lifelong aversion to arising in the dark. Whenever I have to catch a plane at an ungodly hour I shudder and remember the valiant little mare, Rhoda. I was moved on to a private school in nearby Peterborough but still had to drive Rhoda to Hancock, put her in the church stable and take a taxi for the next 12 miles repeating the process each evening. Eventually, I passed the College Board exams in Latin, Maths and English and was accepted by my college of choice, Cornell University.
My Sisyphus was incline planes and no matter how much I puzzled over rates of acceleration and deceleration I could not understand it. So, I was rejected as a candidate for Veterinary College.
My brother and I applied to the American University of Beirut for a junior year abroad. There were three other Americans there that year and we were soon taking excursions into the Bekaa valley and up to the ski slopes with other friends from Damascus, Aleppo and Jerusalem. We had classes in classical Arabic, Middle Eastern history and politics.
A serious misunderstanding with college administrators over the antics of one of the Americans whom I had defended led to my expulsion from the University. I took a job at Khayats books store editing in their publishing business and also retraining horses at the Beirut race track. Apart from my one moment of glory when I was crowned snow queen of Lebanon 1954, I eked out a living and learned to live on doggie bags from Sam’s restaurant. Mother joined us in the late spring and suggested that while John wanted to return to the U.S. we two should take a quick trip to Iran which she would finance.
We took a plane to Tehran where we were met by a friend who introduced us to Narcy Firouz, a Persian Prince of the Kajar dynasty.
Cornell was still there when I returned and the administrators were kind enough to allow me to enrol in the Liberal Arts College. I majored in English literature and minored in Classics; Latin and Greek. I graduated in 1956 with the coveted BA and agreed to meet Narcy in Paris.
We were married at the farm, Hidden Springs, in Virginia and had two daughters, Roshan and Ateshe and a son Caren.
Roshan married (and then divorced) Sir David Reddaway, and had 3 children: Alexander, Touran and Milo. Alex started his own shirt business, Touran has a successful job in Dubaï, and Milo is a student and a cadet in the army.
Ateshe married Björn Larsson, a Swedish diplomat, a had 2 children: Leyla and Narcy. Her husband works as a director in the European Union, her eldest daughter Leyla is a student and a professional horse rider, and her son, Narcy, is a student in high school.
Caren married Leyla Filsoof, and had 2 children: Samira and Kamran.
Narcy had bought two properties in Shiraz; one was on the outskirts of town where we built a house and began a chicken business; the other was 15,000 hectares of scrub steppe an hour away which we called Big Lou and where we planted wheat and fruit trees. When both were seconded by the Government, Narcy’s father gave us 130 hectares of bare land west of Tehran called Norouzabad and suggested we start a new farm.
In the spring four friends and I made the trip to Amol, found the small horse we were looking for and there started a saga that changed the world’s perception of the Oriental horse.
The discovery of this little horse, which I called the Caspian after its provenance, caused a landslide in the archaeological, archaeozoological and genetic world. As research proceeded we understood how the Arab horse came about, what the Central Asian Turkoman was all about and finally all the little pieces fell into shape.
The Revolution was a revelation. Narcy and I would sit having morning coffee looking at the Kayhan International newspaper watching for news of friends and relatives. One morning the house was raided and we were taken to prison where I stayed for two weeks in solitary confinement answering questions. Narcy returned after three months.”
From a manuscript written by Louise Firouz
Following Narcy’s death in 1994, Louise formed a new herd of Caspians on behalf of a friend, John Schneider-Mercke, but eventually had to concentrate on the larger Turkoman horses in order to support herself and her horses, which she used for taking international trekking parties out on her beloved Steppes up to her death at the age of 74.
Louise
and her husband lived close to the ancient Persian Capitol, Persepolis. On the walls of this ancient palace, she had seen rock relief carvings of the Lydian Horse, which had a small prominent skull formation found in many other artifacts resembling the small Caspian. Her knowledge of these artifacts combined with her first sighting of a Caspian Horse in that remote region of Iran, resulted in the historical rediscovery of the ancient, lost breed of the royals - the Caspian Horse!
On that trip, she said, she watched the horse "trot serenely back into history."
During this first trip Louise rescued 3 horses, which were dubbed Caspians. The former owners of these misused, over-worked horses had no idea of the ancient breeds' near extinction!
Between 1965 and 1968, seven mares and six stallions were acquired by Louise to form the foundation stock for a Caspian breeding center in Iran. In spite of Mrs. Firouz' breeding successes, the Iran-Iraq War placed a heavy burden on her endeavors. The Royal Horse Society (RHS) of Iran took over Louise's herd in 1974.
Surviving War and Revolution
Louise started a second private herd in 1975, consisting of 20 mares and 3 stallions. In 1977, this second Caspian breeding center was forced to close its doors and the RHS declared a ban on all Caspian exports. The RHS collected all remaining Caspians. Sadly, due to the political climate, most of the RHS horses were lost. After the Revolution was over, Mrs. Firouz once again completely redeveloped a third breeding center to save the Caspian from extinction in Iran. This herd is now owned by the Ministry of Jehad and Louise was often called upon to assist in management. She has also, in her final years, assisted John Schneider-Merck, a German businessman, in establishing his small private herd of Caspians in Iran.
With Iran's many political upheavals - the overthrow of the Shah during the Islamic Revolution, bombing during the Iran-Iraq War, the very real threat of famine, together with the Caspian's former association with royalty, their survival in their native land has never been assured. The Caspian's fate was ever in the balance between being considered a national treasure and being seizured as wartime food.
Because of her efforts to save the Caspian horses from starvation and slaughter by exportation during the early years of the Islamic Revolution, a total of 19 foundation lines have been exported around the world. These consisted of 9 stallions and 17 mares.
The number of Caspians in Iran is still quite small. Additionally, there are only about 1,600 Caspians world-wide as of 2008. Exportation out of Iran was halted over a decade ago. The last exports occurred in the early '90s, with a small shipment arriving in Great Britain, after a tortuous journey through the Belarous war-zone where bandits attacked and robbed the convoy. Louise's husband Nancy died in May 1994. Due to estate settlement, and the financial losses Mrs. Firouz incurred in the shipment of the last 7 Caspians out of Iran into England she was unable to continue her breeding program in Iran. The remainder of Mrs. Firouz’s Caspian horses were sold to the Ministry of Jehad. The fate of the Caspian remaining in Iran was once again in jeopardy.
More recently, in 1999, aided by the visits into Iran and support of concerned individuals from Canada and the United States, Louise Firouz, at the age of 65, started what turned out to be her final Caspian breeding program on her remote farm at Gara Tepe Sheikh on the Turkoman Steppes next to the Turkmenistan border. On some of her last treks in the spring of 1999, two foundation Caspian stallions and eight Caspian foundation mares were gathered to once again be rescued by Mrs. Firouz’ nurturing care. With her regal ability to overlooking her often tragic past, seemingly overwhelming losses, she experienced until her recent death in 2008, the joy of watching the newborn Caspian foals thrive under her ever watchful eye.
Louise Firouz, 74, an American expatriate in Iran credited with saving the pony-sized Caspian horse from extinction and championing an ancestral link to the prized Arabian breed, died May 25 at a hospital near her home in northeastern Iran. She had lung and liver failure.
Mrs. Firouz spent part of her childhood on her family's farm in Great Falls, where she developed an interest in animal husbandry. After her 1957 marriage to an Iranian aristocrat, she became a horsewoman in her adopted country. She was looking for a suitable horse to saddle-train children when she pursued rumors of a breed of small horses in the north near the Caspian Sea.
When she traveled to the region, she observed the horse treated as a beast of burden and eaten in lean times. But she was amazed at its resemblance to small horses depicted on ancient Persian friezes and seals—animals long thought extinct.
On that trip, she said, she watched the horse "trot serenely back into history."
The Caspian horse, which averages 9 to 13 hands in height, is as short as a pony but has the stride and jumping ability of a horse. It also has an Arabian horse's facial shape and finely proportioned legs.
Mrs. Firouz's efforts to preserve, promote and breed the horse led to genetic testing that won broad acceptance of an ancestral link to the modern Arabian horse. A definitive connection is impossible because of the limits of genetic testing, said Gus Cothran, who performed the tests for Mrs. Firouz in the early 1990s and is now a clinical professor at Texas A&M University's College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.
Mrs. Firouz was also pivotal in finding people who had the resources to establish breeding populations outside Iran, including Prince Philip of the British royal family. Her work became urgent during the Islamic Revolution of the late 1970s and the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, when the Iranian government auctioned off most of the breed or used the animals to detect land mines. ad_icon
Cothran said there are "viable populations" of Caspian horses in the United States, Great Britain and Australia—all because of Mrs. Firouz's export of the breed in the early 1970s and, briefly, in the early 1990s.
The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy in Pittsboro, N.C., places the Caspian horse on its list of most-endangered animals, meaning there are fewer than 200 annual registrations of purebreds in the United States and an estimated global population of fewer than 2,000.
Louise Elizabeth Laylin was born Dec. 24, 1933, in Washington, where her father was an international lawyer. After her parents divorced, she spent summers on her father's farm in Great Falls, known as Hidden Springs, but mostly was raised in New Hampshire.
It was her intention to become a veterinarian, but she failed a required physics course and instead majored in classics and English literature at Cornell University in 1956.
During her junior year, she studied abroad at the American University of Beirut and met her future husband, Yale-trained civil engineer Narcy Firouz, during a side trip to Iran. He was descended from Iran's Qajar dynasty, which ruled before the Pahlavis overthrew it in 1921.