Louise Firouz - Surviving War and Revolution

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 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.