So now they are talking on SDC Talk about putting Humpty Dumpty together again. The thesis being that now the arch-rivals Doug Willett and Jeffrey Bragg are ... what was the careful phrase ... "no longer going to pursue things as they were", then perhaps the remnants of a supposedly divided Seppala population could be brought together (by whom, for goodness sake?) to establish a "renewed sense of vigour" for Seppalas.
An honest question, I suppose. My reaction, though, is that it simply ignores too much recent history. And, as usual, it ignores THE DOGS THEMSELVES in favour of what-the-poeople-think-about-the-dogs. I haven't noticed that my Seppalas suffer from any lack of a "sense of vigour." They continue to remain, as they have been for the past ten or fifteen years, the last surviving remnant of the pure strain, the real deal uncontaminated by all the various admixtures from the mainstream Siberian Husky world of showdogs, backyard breeding, and futile efforts to "make Siberians competitive" with racing mongrels.
For the truth is that too much has been wasted by the very people who usually do so much of the talking on places like SDC. Herewith, then, I offer a brief summary of "what happened to the Seppalas" over the past two decades. I say brief summary, but even so it may be a little lengthy, so I'll probably break this up into two or three posts.
In 1990 when I took up the Seppala torch for the second time around, there were plenty of McFaul/Shearer bloodline animals still on the ground. Carolyn Ritter had done some excellent breeding and had acquired useful pure-strain stock from Doug Willett. There were smaller quantities of dogs available from the Whitmores, Brad Pozarnsky and a handful of others. I was in Spain at the time, so somewhat handicapped in trying to assemble a breeding group of McFaul/Shearer (or Markovo-Seppala, if you prefer) dogs, but nevertheless I got River View's Hurley, Kidron of Spirit Wind, River View's Crobar, Karcajou's Dreama of Windigo, Norde of Sepp-Alta and Dally of Seppa-Alta, and managed a breeding of Dreama with Hercules of Sepp-Alta while he was on lease in Germany. Three years later when Carolyn sold out, I added Xpace of Seppalta, Zirconia of Sepp-Alta, River View's Sprite, and Grizzly of Sepp-Alta as I moved from Spain back to Canada. There were at that time still plenty of other dogs available of closely similar bloodlines.
Since that time the situation has changed radically. In 1990-93 all the dogs were mutually accessible to one another (in theory) as part of a single gene pool in the AKC/CKC Siberian Husky registry -- but at the same time, they remained vulnerable to what had always been a crippling attrition factor, namely the interbreeding of Seppalas with showdogs, backyard-breds, and "racing Siberian Huskies." The trouble with that was that the Seppala gene pool thus endured continuing genetic losses, but never any replacement of those losses. I knew at the time that the situation was already growing quite grave. Good luck and alertness gave me the chance to acquire new stock from Siberia in the brief window when Sergei Solovyev was breeding Siberians from dogs he picked up in Chukotkan villages. I made herculean efforts to get Shakal iz Solovyev accepted into the Siberian Husky studbook of the Canadian Kennel Club, and was soundly and firmly rebuffed, and even threatened by the Club's CEO. At that time CKC was not into genetic renewal.
I went to Agriculture Canada as the next-best option for preserving the extant Seppala gene pool and allowing its genetic refreshment with stock from Siberia. The Ministry of Agriculture was proactive and allowed us to charter an association for the Seppala Siberian Sleddog as an evolving breed. Evolving breed status gave the Seppala population protection from random mixed breeding with mainstream Siberian Huskies, while giving us the flexibility to add new Siberia import stock when and as it could be found.
The trouble was, nobody was interested. From 1997 to 2002 what the Seppala Siberian Sleddog Project was doing was ignored by almost everyone. It was not possible to maintain an active association, and virtually all the breeding was taking place within the confines of Seppala Kennels. In 1998 I set up the Project's first website, which was online for two or three years, until we ran into web-hosting problems (this was in the early days of the Internet, remember).
When the site was taken offline, the usual rumour-mill swung into action: they concluded that Jeffrey was dead, and his work up for grabs. Lanette Kimball had seen the SSSD Project website, and thought it might be neat to start "something similar" in the USA. She mentioned her idea to DW and his then-protégés Bob and Tamara Davis. Tamara Davis had a file of Seppala photographs that she had downloaded from the Project website, because she "thought those photos should be preserved." An email list discussion took place in which it was said that someone ought to "take over that website" and keep it online -- minus Jeffrey's weird opinions, of course, recasting the material in an acceptable mid-distance-heat-racer's context.
Posted by ditkoofseppala at August 15, 2010 11:39 AM