Page 23 - THE SLOUGHI REVIEW Issue 15

T H E S L O U G H I R E V I E W 2 3

Let us continue reading what the people of the SKG write about the Saluki Loofah Al

Khalij:
"The decisive factor as to which breed a dog belongs to can only be the phenotype and not the
genotype, which is largely unknown to us. The Saluki Club has it in its power to keep
atypical dogs out of the breeding programme at the time of its inspections, so any atypical
offspring of the bitch "Loofah" cannot have a detrimental effect on Saluki breeding; on the

other hand, we are of the opinion that the typical offspring of the bitch can be quite valuable
for Saluki breeding in view of the rather narrow breeding base of the breed in Switzerland
and in view of the associated risk of the spread of hereditary diseases - we mention
cystinuria.

As we have also discovered, the dogs from the "Tepe Gawra" kennel also perform excellently
on the racetrack, and it must surely be in the interests of the club to promote the
performance of the Saluki as a racing dog."

It must therefore be noted that there is a certain laxity in the SKG with regard to the

origin and characteristics of the coat of the Salukis from the Arabian Peninsula. This is
certainly due to a certain extent to the lack of knowledge of the Salukis of this origin.

Unlike Dr. John E. Burchard, who can very accurately assign feathered, sparsely feathered
and smooth origins to specific Bedouin strains. With regard to the Sinai Peninsula, the

SKG describes "transitions from one type to another as quite fluid", which is in clear
contradiction to Burchard's firm statement.

On top of that, the sighthounds of the Maghreb are included in these "transitions from
one type to another", which is categorically wrong, as the historical sources repeatedly
emphasise and clearly delineate (see Hon. Florence Amherst, General Eugène Daumas
etc.). To conclude from the short-hair of a Saluki, whether from the Arabian Peninsula or

not, to a short-hair of the North African Sloughi with a different coat structure and coat
colour, must be regarded as a certain superficiality.

In the late 1970s, however, we still find the classification of Sloughi and Saluki on the basis
of the coat, for example in Rüdiger Daub, who describes the Sloughi simply as a "smooth

variant of the Oriental greyhound", which, however, "is rightly recognised as a separate
breed". It can therefore be regarded as the state of knowledge at the time.

However, this attitude that the Sloughi is the smooth version of the Saluki has only
crept in since the early 1920s. As we also see with Hon. Florence Amherst, she did not

hold this opinion from the beginning. It is only from this perspective that Daub writes:
"It is, however, very closely related to the mostly feathered Tazy ("Saluki")."