One of the most contentious areas throughout the history of the SSSD Project was the question of dog prices. Why this should be, one has to wonder!
People go to the dealers who sell recreational machines, pay $6,500-$11,000 for a new Polaris snowmobile, or $8,000-$16,000 for a new Suzuki King Quad muscle ATV, take the machine home, use it and be happy. They don't accuse the dealer of running a scam, or try to take the machine without paying for it, or go back to the dealer months later and try to chisel half the price they paid out of him. They don't howl blue murder to everyone about how the prices are "unreasonable" or "extortionate," or spend a lot of time on message boards arguing about how these machines should never cost more than $500 or $1000. Yet all of this kind of behaviour has been the rule, not the exception, in the SSSD world.
In 1950 the partnership of C. S. MacLean and J. D. McFaul bought the remaining Siberian sleddogs that had been housed and bred at Grey Rocks Inn ski resort. They also bought the "Seppala Kennels" name from breeder Harry R. Wheeler. In the early 1950s Donnie McFaul sold a number of male Seppalas, particularly to Laconia NH dogsled racer Keith Bryar. In those days the going price for a male Seppala from Donnie was $1,000; and Donnie wouldn't sell a bitch at any price. (Bryar finally wound up buying a single female from Bill Shearer, and heaven knows what he paid for Foxstand's Rumba; all subsequent Bryar Seppala-lineage stock was bred from the one bitch Rumba and her daughters.)
In the 1950s a Hershey bar cost a nickel; so did a Coca-Cola. Today both those items cost a buck or more in most convenience stores, gas bars and other impulse-purchase consumer outlets. In general it would be fair to say that inflation has increased the prices of many kinds of consumer goods twentyfold over the past fifty years.
One should note that veterinary fees have probably outstripped even that standard in many places, as have dogfood prices. Now, if Jeffrey were to apply the Hershey-Bar Index of Price Inflation to McFaul/Shearer Seppala-lineage dogs, I would be selling them at $20,000 apiece for males and trying to keep females off the market except for selling an occasional bitch for... what?... $50,000?
But I'm not doing that. Instead, I have tried to get $1,500-$3,000 for bitches and similar prices for males. In the past I have sold co-ownerships for as high as $2,000 - a co-ownership that the co-owner happily insisted gave him permanent possession of the animal, and only gave me stud access (but not litter access) and a sort of vague, theoretical control over the beast's subsequent re-sale (a control I'd have no way of enforcing)! And the owners in question - you know who you are - have bitched blue murder about the "exorbitant" prices and accused me of "running a scam to inflate prices by limiting availability." Indeed, one of them actually re-sold dogs that he had not yet paid us for as per agreement, and pocketed the proceeds! (That sort of thing used to be called "theft" or "fraud" - I don't know what it's called these days.)
I am told by noobs who think they know it all, that the above prices are "way above the going rate." Depends on whose rate is going, I guess. I recall a dozen or so years ago when a Quest wannabe (now a major player) told me, "I've never paid more than $200 for a dog and I never will!" I know that for many years The Great One of Seppaladom told everybody who would listen, "Keep the prices down! Mushers are not rich!" Of course, TGO had his own interests to consider in so doing. He always insisted on running what he referred to as a "one-bucket kennel," meaning an upper limit of something like 25 dogs at most, I would suppose. As he was always active in mid-distance heat racing, he needed to go through a fair number of dogs to stay competitive, so I suppose he valued his ability to dispose instantly of any dog who didn't make the cut, more than he valued any particular level of ROI (return on investment). Well, TGO wasn't running a breed-development programme. His take on genetics was as follows: "In the end, Seppalas may fail due to genetic problems, but I won't care, because while I was around, my Siberians were the best!" In any case, why should The Great One's word be law? What makes his way of doing things binding on me? The Quest laddie thought I should sell dogs to him for $150 or $200; I told him "no way," as was my right. (It infuriated him.)
Nevertheless, that kind of attitude has been so prevalent that, in the end, it has put my wife and me pretty well out of the dog-breeding game. For several years I have told people that I've put something like a quarter of a million dollars into the dogs since 1990... and for those same several years I've been steadily putting something like another $20K into the dogs year in, year out; so the truth is that I don't really know what my global expenditure has been. It's likely twice the figure I just mentioned, or close to it. Enough for me to have retired on, if I'd had sense enough just to write poetry instead of stewarding Seppalas. So my money's gone, and I can no longer afford to breed litters on spec and to subsidise other peoples' desire to own Seppalas, all the while suffering their jeers, backbiting and accusations.
What is it that makes Seppala wannabes so incredibly cheap? I think it must be the racing and the numbers game. I've never promoted Seppalas as racing dogs, and I've never bought into the numbers game. Doesn't matter. Enough other people do to make things like the SSSD Project economically non-viable.
Maybe in another post I'll discuss "the numbers game" in greater detail. It has been a long time since I've done so; might be a good topic to revisit.