Call it the collective unconscious, call it the Zeitgeist, or even call it the tonal of the times. No matter how you label it, there's a well-defined aggregate of notions, concepts, belief-systems and stimulus/response behavioural cues sloshing around in any particular culture at any particular time. These things go relatively unexamined for validity and applicability. Many of them are word-control cues, ranging from things like "duly constituted authority" to "olympic gold medalist." In these cases the mere invocation of the phrase is enough to trigger strong emotions, attitudes, complex patterns of behaviour.
Some of this stuff has messed up the dog world pretty badly, and particularly sleddog breeds. What I have always called "the Olympics mentality" has created in most dogsled racers, not to mention a vast army of Ididablogging armchair mushers, a tendency to an unexamined (and not-to-be-questioned) jock elitism. "Breed the best to the best" is one of its cardinal maxims. And they never even say what they mean by "best," so powerful is this brew; it creates instant intoxication, no explanation required. The numbers game is its mainstay, and it is pure poison for purebred sleddog breeds, most especially for small, threatened populations like Seppalas.
The Great One and his buddies talked it all over online five years ago. TGO professed that he believed "totally" in best-to-best; then he immediately followed that credo up by saying he believed "totally" in avoiding homozygosity! He explained that the trouble was, there just didn't seem to be enough "bests"; and concluded (temporarily) that "it appears that we are doomed." Backing away from the abyss, he observed that there were plenty of bests in the Alaskan husky realm, and decided that the best way to proceed might be to borrow a few of those for Seppala breeding.
Of course, nobody in that discussion bothered to define their terms, and one term that went (as always) undefined was "Alaskan husky." The truth is, few people have a very clear understanding of what that term really means. They use it as though it were the name of just another breed, like Siberian Husky, Alaskan Malamute, et al.
Purebred dog breeds, as I pointed out fifteen years ago in "Purebred Dog Breeds into the Twenty-First Century", are (or should be) defined by purpose, by typology, and by ancestry. All three factors make up a firm tripod of breed identity. Remove one or two of the three, and you don't have a stable breed.
The Alaskan husky is defined by purpose only -- and even more dangerously, by specific levels of performance for that purpose, at least at the "elite" level, what they call their World Class Alaskan Husky or WCAH (say "wookah"). So it's not a breed. A WCAH is only a WCAH when it's crossing the finish line of the Fairbanks ONAC at eighteen miles an hour.
The Great One made this same mistake with his Seppalas. He said, in the latter years, that Seppalas were only Seppalas when they were performing to a level specified by him at a certain kind of race (heat-style mid-distance, if it makes any difference). He also recommended that to be considered Seppalas the dogs ought to finish these certain specified races "within 110% of the winner's time." (No, I'm not making this up!)
What nobody realised was this: when you breed an Alaskan husky to a recognised breed, what you get is more Alaskan huskies. Particularly when and if you follow TGO's recipe. When there's no recognisable type needed, and no pedigree barrier, and only a performance requirement, then you don't have a breed. All you have is a means to an end, really. And if you are racing, one would have thought that the end in view would be to WIN the race, not to finish as a 110% also-ran. So the application of this set of breeding standards by DW, I mean TGO, soon had the predictable result -- several of the folks who were in on that little dialogue switched to Alaskan huskies shortly thereafter. All that a formula like that can do is to destroy Seppalas.
But these notions continue to slosh around in the collective unconscious, poisoning the minds of naïve noobs, making them think that sleddogs are worthless when they are not "race proven" and leading them to believe that the $300-500 dog ought to be the norm, and that racing culls are somehow "better". Very seldom are these beliefs quite brought into the conscious mind for rational examination; they stay in the subconscious, driving emotions and dog-politics.
I wish I had understood all this earlier in the game, or more accurately, I wish I had realised how idle and vain it is to attempt to oppose this kind of stuff with rational argument. Live and learn.
(For those who may be interest, this linked file gives chapter and verse for the discussion referred to above; it was published on the isssd website a few years ago.)
Posted by ditkoofseppala at July 14, 2010 09:24 PM