Seppala Kennels 'SledDogBlog'

Lizzy won't quit

Little Lizzy Lineout, Jeffrey's "girlfriend" and young leader, is showing her ancestry just now. We used to call her dear departed sire SEPALLOP "Bonehead" sometimes, for his sheer bullheaded determination. It looks like Lizzy got a big helping of that, too.

She had trouble feeding her litter at first -- just didn't seem to have enough milk to keep seven puppies growing very fast, and she didn't seem all that thrilled with the motherhood thing. Once the pups learned to eat from a dish at three weeks of age, they were out of the woods though, and started gaining well. Lizzy kept at it, with a serious and at times doleful mien. She seemed relieved when I put them outside in the puppy pen at four weeks of age and later, around five weeks, allowed her to start going around with me again in the daytime. I thought she'd get them weaned and be rid of them just as soon as she decently could.

Wrong. I reckoned without the "Bonehead" factor! Hanging in there like grim death, Little Lizzy Lineout is STILL nursing her litter twice daily at over eight weeks of age. Whether she actually still has any milk or not, I'm not sure -- two or three days ago I'm fairly sure she did -- but she lets them nurse for four or five minutes anyway. They are suddenly getting BIG and she can hardly stand up when they all go for her -- she staggers repeatedly as they nurse. Well, to be fair, her mother KOLYMA OF SEPPALA has been known to do the same thing, so between Momma and Daddy I guess poor Lizzy hasn't much chance of making up her own mind about these things...

The information age

It has only recently really come home to me what a tremendous watershed we have passed, all unknowing, as dog breeders over the past decade or so. There is no one moment to which one could point and say, "There! it was on that particular day that our whole world changed." No. Like many really big changes, it has come about gradually but quite forcefully.

Dog breeding has entered the information era. We now have access to information in a way we never had before. Computers and the Internet have done it. Before we relied on books, word of mouth and personal experience. Now the personal experience of many is available to many, where before only through published books was the personal knowledge and experience of one person available to many. Apart from published books and newsletters, it was a few-to-few proposition. New ideas disseminated slowly, if at all. And there were times when it seemed as though the lowest common denominator ruled, when old wives' tales and outdated information were rife. Even simple pedigree information had to be painstakingly researched, either directly from registry stud books (assuming you could locate a set of published volumes) or uncertainly by copying from one breeder's pedigree collection to another's. And nobody, but nobody, had ever heard about anything like "population genetics."

Now, all of a sudden ANY serious breeder can have access to sophisticated computer software for kennel management, can put together (or sometimes just download) a breed database and research 10 or 12 generation pedigrees, can calculate inbreeding coefficient. Now there are email lists to discuss specialised interests of all kinds, including veterinary health problems and genetics. Now there is online access to scholarly papers on canine topics, as well as to a wealth of serious material on an educated layman's level. Now population genetics has become -- not yet mainstream knowledge -- but a matter for serious discussion among the more aware kind of dog breeders. And for whatever it may ultimately turn out to be worth, the canine genome is being sequenced and researched.

Participation in any major email discussion list such as the Yahoo "Canine Genetics" list quickly results in a feeling of information overload, mental indigestion even. Too much is being discussed by too many people too many threads, all at once -- it's getting hard to keep up with just one active list, let alone several. I repeat, we've suddenly entered the information age. And now, paradoxically, information is not enough.

When information is everywhere, it is no longer the limiting factor. And so we are down to something much more difficult -- judgment. Of course, that's what has always distinguished the best dog breeders from the others. But maybe it has become that much more difficult to apply that judgment, given the welter of new information -- and that much more vital to do so.

A new day for the Project website!

It's a red-letter day for the Seppala Siberian Sleddog Project website! Yesterday I had the domain nameservers changed, and today we are now ONLINE with a new webhost and a new site organisation, not to mention a large number of pages that have been reformatted to CSS and newly edited! I guess we'll still have a period of chasing down broken links and debugging, but the important work has now been completed, and it all looks good. Some complicated scripted things are not yet reinstalled and working, like the searchable database and the forums, but that can now be addressed without too many distractions.

And pretty soon, maybe we'll even manage some new content! <G>

Test

Test entry for new webhost.

New webhost

This is SledDogBlog's first entry from the server of our new webhost, BlueHost.com. dotCanada finally blew it enough times for me to fear that one day I'd discover that the company was bankrupt and our web files irretrievably lost. Nice people, but they couldn't solve their server-maintenance and interdepartmental communications problems. Let's hope for better times with a larger and more stable hosting company.