REPORT FROM THE 2025 WAHO CONFERENCE:
Astra Nilk, Estonia: (with PowerPoint) Good morning to everybody, first I would like to thank our hosts for their generosity, my name is Astra Nilk I am the Registrar and Board Member of the Estonian Arabian Stud Book. My co-delegate is Annika Siboja.
The Estonian Arabian Horse Stud Book is quite small and we currently have only about 140 living Arabian horses, but still, this can be considered as a hefty increase compared to the beginning, when we started our stud book with only 25 Arabian horses. The number of foals per year has always stood under 10. It mostly depends on the situation of the Estonian horse market which has drastically decreased due to the uncertain political situation in Europe. We remain hopeful about the future.
Arabian horses are mostly used for endurance riding in Estonia. Endurance riding is a rapidly developing discipline in Estonia and the main goal is to compete at the highest level and participate in the World Championships as a team. The Estonian team competed in the World Championship in 2022, which was held here at Boudtheib, Abu Dhabi and they finished this competition in the fourth place as a team. Our Society tries to help in every way, we help organize competitions, educate riders and trainers and do our best to keep this level.
Show activity is not so popular in Estonia and it depends mostly on our location. We have little possibilities to participate in shows in nearby countries as it takes a lot of effort to travel with horses to Central Europe. But we do hold one show each year, named the Arabian Horse Day, and we try to find foreign judges. There are usually 10 to 20 horses in different classes. Most of the foreign judges are ready and willing to educate our breeders and we organize a small course after the Show every year.
As Estonia is known as a highly IT technological country we try to implement this skill also in the horse industry. For stud book data collection and evaluation we have developed software called Equiscoring, which collects and processes a wide range of horse data from different sources such as the Estonian Horse Registry, the Estonian National Competition Database and the F.E.I. database. The Estonian Arab Horse Stud Book is also available online via Equiscoring since this year, it provides main data such as registration details, UELN, microchip, pedigree and any competition results. The main goal of this software is to help stud books make their work more effective and to save time and to make horse evaluation and data processing fast and modern
We started linear profiling for sport horses in Estonia about 20 years ago now we are trying to implement this for Arabian horses too. . It makes it possible to evaluate horses online, both on linear scoring and on a point scale, to create and publish results and individual evaluation sheets in real time. With this new software it make it possible to analyse all available data and gives a new perspective for observing inheritance of specific traits and breeding values of horses based on results of their foals, and to make inheritance profiles for breeding horses.
Estonia is a small country and we have as few Arabian horses as we have people. But we are trying our best to increase popularity of Arabian beauties and breed as good horses as possible. I want to share special thanks to our generous hosts and to the WAHO Office for all the patience and help with our stud book, and thanks to all colleagues. It’s an honour to be part of a worldwide network of Arabian horses. Thank you.
REPORT FROM THE 2017 WAHO CONFERENCE:
Astra Nilk, Estonia: Hello to everyone, good afternoon. Estonia is present for our first time in WAHO Conference and I am very happy and grateful to be here. My name is Astra Nilk and I am the Registrar of Arabian horses in Estonia.
Estonia founded our Studbook and applied for membership of WAHO in 2007. At this time there were only about 25 purebred Arabian horses in the whole of Estonia. Since then, within the last 10 years our population of Arabian horses has increased by three times and now we have 85 living Arabian horses in Estonia. We breed less than 10 foals per year and we export and import a small number of horses every year. In the beginning of our stud book we had mostly Russian bloodlines, now our population is much more international, including Egyptian and Polish bloodlines.
Our most popular activities are endurance riding and, a little bit less maybe, showing Arabian horses. We organise about 15 national and 1 or 2 international endurance competitions per year. From the show side, we have 1 National show per year, this is named Arabian Horse Day, which is our most important event for Arabian horses. This takes place at a dressage show which is open for Arabian purebred horses with classic show classes and also pleasure riding classes. Normally in this Arabian Horse Day about 30 horses are shown, which makes about 30% of all our population. For the future, we are planning to enhance cooperation in our region with other Nordic Baltic countries and organise more Arabian horse events together, maybe for example a Nordic Baltic Arabian Championship.
About stud book work, this year we are working with our studbook second volume and the WAHO trophy was awarded for the third time in Estonia. Thank you very much for your attention.
STATISTICS FOR 2011:
Foals registered: 7
Horses imported: 2
Artificial insemination and the use of imported and exported semen is allowed.
Embryo transfer is not allowed.
There are now 2 Shows and 7 Endurance competitions annually.
The Estonian Horse Breeders Society – Arab Horse Stud Book, reports as follows for 2008:
Estonia became an Applying Member of WAHO in 2007. The first Estonian Arabian Horse Stud Book is set for publication in 2009. 7 foals were registered in 2008, at present there are an estimated 11 active broodmares and 4 active breeding stallions. The estimated number of living Arabians is 50.
All foals are parent verified by DNA prior to registration and passports are issued. No horses were exported in 2008, and 5 were imported, being 2 from Sweden, 2 from Austria, and one from The Netherlands.
Artificial Insemination and the use of imported semen is permitted, at this time Embryo Transfer is not yet permitted.
We organize 1 Arabian show each year, as well as 8 endurance rides.
