Just a few months before her 81st birthday, Brazilian breeder and judge Lenita (Maria Helena Ribeiro) Perroy passed away yesterday. With her, the Arab world has lost a breeder, who has created her own “horse type” in 35 years of breeding, by line breeding and a very special eye for beauty.
Lenita Perroy was born on April 6, 1937. Her family had a sugarcane and coffee plantation and bred horses. At that time horses were still needed on the plantations to monitor the work from the back of the horse. Therefore Lenita rode as a child with her parents and brothers on the farm and spent most of her time in the stable. Horses were her great passion, and later she returned to her beginnings when she acquired the farm Haras Meia Lua in 1981, a 200-acre farm spread over rolling hills. For two years she traveled around, visited studs of all possible breeds of horses and came to the conclusion that beauty had top priority for her. Not surprising, her choice fell on the Arabian horse. In 1983 she bought her first mares in the USA, granddaughters and great-granddaughters of Nazeer, all covered by El Shaklan. After another three years, a good stallion had to be found: this was Ali Jamaal.
Ali Jamaal wrote breeding history and already with its first foal crop Lenita Peroy stepped into the international limelight. In addition to Nazeer, El Shaklan and Ali Jamaal, also Bey Shah blood was later integrated into the breeding program through some daughters. Meanwhile, the horses of Haras Meia Lua can be found all over the world. Probably the largest collection of Lenita Perry’s horses can be found in Europe at La Movida stud of Ferdinand Huemer.
Lenita knew how to interweave these different lines in an artistic way and thus to create her very own type. Numerous breeders around the world have benefited from it. Her name will also be forever associated with the name of Ali Jamaal, because without Lenita his qualities might never have come to fruition.