Seppala Kennels 'SledDogBlog'

New Forum

As a logical next step from all the discussion of AKC, the Chinook takeover, registries, the nature of dog breeds, and so forth -- I've now done what perhaps I should have done years ago. I've established a public online forum to discuss these very matters.

Twenty-First Century Dog Breeds

On the new forum I hope we shall be able to discuss the theory and future of canine registries, the ways in which registries help and harm dogs, the theory and nature of dog breeds, how our notions about purebred status and breed purity may have impacted the health of our dogs, the special situation of minority or "rare breeds," and similar issues. We shall also discuss any "special situations" such as the current kerfluffle over AKC status for Chinooks and the problem of the "Chinook Cross" bloodlines.

21st Century Dog Breeds is unaffiliated with any existing registries or associations and is not limited to any particular dog breeds, although it will start life with individual breed forums for Seppala Siberian Sleddogs and Chinooks. We shall add other individual forums for any breed for which there is enough interest to support a forum to discuss the type of issues described above. It is not, however, intended that these shall be general breed-chat forums of the usual kind and discussions are expected to revolve around the forum themes as described on the front page.

Takeover Accepted?

Surreal is the word for it. Not the only word, but the word. Pusillanimous would be another. I'm talking about the strange goings on among the Chinook breeders, still. It's a little hard to know quite what to make of it, but the bottom line seems clear enough. All the COA/UKC contingent were waiting for was the first sign of weakness from CCA, the first chink in the armour, the least little concession -- so that they could then surrender and get in line to march to the doorstep of the AKC!

The CCA Director made a rather poor showing online (see previous post), no skilled debater, she. Nevertheless, whether deliberately or inadvertently, she made exactly the right noise at one point -- when she said she "would not not consider a breeding to a dog from the cross program" you could feel the earth move. That weak double-negative statement was enough, apparently, to initiate the paradigm-shift that would spell doom for the UKC Chinook. After she left the list, another Board member came on to say that actually, only a small handful of CCA members opposed acceptance of the Chinook Cross Program dogs, and that a committee was "working on a solution." She followed that up with a plea for more members, after first explaining that CCA already had enough members to satisfy AKC, so people who joined would not be giving CCA "any further advantage," and that Cross breeders needed to join in order to have a say and represent their own viewpoint. The message was clear: get on board if you don't want to be left behind, the AKC train is leaving now.

There has been very little dialogue on the AKC topic since then. I think we can presume a rush to buy a ticket. Takeover accepted!

Takeover Update 2

Discussion of the impending entry of the Chinook breed into the AKC Miscellaneous Class has continued, sometimes at a frenetic pace, on at least one Chinook email list. CCA Director Patti Richards, after a period of relative silence punctuated by enigmatic one-line messages (sample: "This post is so full of misinformation that it isn’t worth reading." -- directed at this blog's author) came briefly onlist this afternoon with three brief messages, apparently to clarify her own personal position. In one message she said that she knew she was opening herself to attack, but wanted to state HER feelings, then stated that she would not not consider (her wording) breeding to a Chinook Cross dog; and that she had never said she wouldn't allow her dogs to be bred to a dog that was only UKC registered. In a second message she stated that the stud book would remain "open" for at least five years subsequent to AKC recognition. In the final one she said that the CCA Registrar was working with AKC to correct errors in the registry; that CCA had been given information (whose nature wasn't specified) supposed to be from AKC that turned out to be incorrect, that she was starting at zero and trying to get answers; that when polled more than half the CCA membership either felt that the Cross dogs should not be accepted or that working to fulfil the Miscellaneous Class requirements was more important; and that CCA members want full AKC recognition. She then unsubscribed from the list before she could be questioned for further details!

Leaving everyone quite upset and frustrated since her messages raised more questions than they answered, and contradicted the FAQs on the CCA site rather impressively. Further exchanges with two remaining CCA members revealed the fact that nobody knows much about the "registrar" and that the website doesn't name her; as well as the fact that there is apparently deep division in the CCA membership and Board.

At least it's good to see that they are obviously running scared and either unable or afraid to answer questions or to engage in rational debate on a breeder's list.

"True Purebred AKC Chinooks"

The pot continues to boil and fume as Chinook Club of America (CCA) recklessly attempts to steer the Chinook breed full steam ahead towards a looming iceberg, as convinced of their invulnerability as the masters of the Titanic. Everyone is blithely talking about "true purebred AKC Chinooks," who will have them, who will not. Some folks, to their credit, are saying, "Okay, this makes no sense at all, so I will just keep on breeding my UKC 'mutts', because I have both kinds, eligibles and non-eligibles, and to me there's no difference; dog 'A' is no more Chinook than dog 'C', they are equally Chinooks to me."

But the same folks also acknowledge that there may be trouble on the horizon. One correspondent said, "Many people don't know better and having AKC Chinooks will be a big draw for a person looking for a pet, show dog, or breeding prospect." It is certainly true that few outsiders even begin to understand the complexities and the history of this canine population. I hesitate to call it a "breed" for reasons I'll explain -- apart from the fact that with each passing day, I get a little sicker every time I hear that word.

Let's get something straight here! CCA and AKC are talking about "purebred Chinooks" as though this were something self-evident and true, beyond dispute. As an honest cynologist, I don't buy their line of hype. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A "PUREBRED CHINOOK." Therefore, there is no earthly reason to attempt to discriminate between "purebred Chinooks" and Chinook Crosses. This is a clear case of The Emperor's New Clothes -- something that exists only as a state of mind, a fantasy belief system, impossible to demonstrate in any concrete fashion on the ground.

You cannot take a 1917 crossbred mongrel (sired by a Heinz 57 mongrel on a working expeditionary Eskimo dog), howsoever prepotent and admirable a beast he may have been, and magically transform his progeny (from a variety of bitches of other breeds, principally German Shepherd Dog and Belgian Shepherd) into "purebreds" just by inbreeding them into near-extinction over a 75-year history.

Yes, Chinooks are recognisable insofar as they bear a vague family resemblance to one another. Yes, they have been somewhat consistently bred as a population under somewhat of a pedigree barrier (but with gaps and inconsistencies aplenty). The trouble is, though, you can find "Chinookalikes" on farms and in dog pounds across the continent. The Chinook "type" is a common mongrel phenotype that pops up very easily whenever European shepherd-dog blood is mixed with other breeds. Tan, buff, and tawny dogs with dark masks and semi-erect ears are plentiful and perennial as the grass.

I know some Chinooks, and they are delightful dogs. I own two; my wife owns quite a few. They are a genuine piece of 20th-century Americana, an enjoyable relic of the days of the "gentlemen adventurers" and explorers. But it is absolute nonsense to take a small part of the population descended from the eleven dogs rescued in 1982 from the wreck of the Perry Greene kennels, proclaim them "purebred," and then turn around and say that the rest of the same population, descended from the same source, is "not purebred" because it had additional input AFTER the PG rescue from the source-breeds of the initial mongrel mix. That is not only elitism, it is utter, arrant NONSENSE.

I'm sorry to have to say these things so bluntly. It is not pleasant to be forced to do so. We all have our illusions, and we enjoy grooming them. (Human kind cannot bear very much reality, said a great 20th-century poet.) Dog breeds need their breed myths. We all like to feel that our dogs are somehow special.

But this "purebred Chinook" fantasy nonsense has gone much too far already. A relatively small part of the "breed" fancy is now prepared to make life difficult to impossible for the majority, by cuddling up to a mammoth showdog certificate-mill in order to obtain special status, preference for their own little bunch of mutts. It is unsportsmanlike. It is unfair. It is not in the best interest of the dogs. It is not even in the best interests of the fantasy "breed." It is only a cheap power play by a minority faction, aided and abetted by cynical commercial motives of a mammoth 19th-century organisation that needs to be taken down and dismantled as obsolete.

Takeover Update

I've never really believed in coincidence. So when my wife received a curious email message from a presumably neutral third party tonight, I could only conclude that if the post immediately below this one threw down the gauntlet, that gauntlet has immediately been picked up! (And I thought Seppala politics were heavy...)

The message in question "leaked" the news that The Parent Club (CCA) has indeed decided to fast track the Chinook breed into AKC Miscellaneous Class, and thence to full AKC breed recognition within the next two years! It further stated that not only the Chinook Cross dogs and their owners, but also the twenty-five breeders of Chinook "purebreds" who stayed out of FSS in protest at the biased and inequitable way in which things were being handled, "will be permanently excluded from AKC and the breed will split."

That's putting it pretty god-damned bluntly, isn't it! A lot of people have been sitting on the fence, trying to decide how this thing would play out. It now seems likely that all they'll get for their fence-sitting is a bunch of pickets up their butts.

C'est la guerre, ça.

Hostile Takeover

It just recently crashed through to me that what amounts to a hostile takeover bid is now taking place in a minority sled dog breed -- and that it affects me directly, because my wife's 37 dogs are involved (not to mention two that I own).

Few people know much about the Chinook breed, apart from the fact that it originated with adventurer and Byrd Antarctic dog wrangler Arthur T. Walden, descending from his famous 1920's lead dog who gave his name to the breed. The original "Chinook" was a mongrel; his sire "Kim" was of unknown origin but thought to have St. Bernard influence in his background; his dam "Ningo" was described as "Eastern Eskimo" from Peary expedition stock. Walden bred Chinook to a variety of bitches. Initially they were simply known as "Walden's 'Chinook' dogs," but eventually the idea of making them into a breed took shape.

Walden and the original Chinook

Walden was no financial genius. He readily admitted that his best move had been to marry a wealthy woman, Kate Sleeper. His talents lay in dog handling, adventuring, exploring, and writing. Admiral Byrd systematically milked Walden and Sleeper to help fund his first Antarctic expedition; the 1929 market crash ensued as well. Walden and Sleeper ran short of funds before he returned from Antarctica. Walden lost his famous leader, aged 12, when he wandered away from the camp in Antarctica and was never found. Milton and Eva B. Seeley had been hired as kennel managers with a half-interest in the kennel; Kate Sleeper fell ill and their Wonalancet Farm got into financial troubles, with the result that on Walden's return from the Byrd expedition, he lost the kennel and the dogs to the Seeleys. The bulk of Walden's dogs, therefore, never got to contribute to the ongoing development of the breed; indeed, in later years Eva B. Seeley told people, "there is no such thing as a Chinook." Thus the first major bottleneck occurred for the Chinook "breed" shortly after its inception.

Only three of Chinook's progeny contributed to future generations, dogs Walden had previously given to Julia Lombard's Wonalancet-Hubbard Kennels. "Hootchinoo" was a son of Chinook out of a dam sired by Chinook on a German Shepherd bitch. "Jock" and "Zembla" were also Chinook's progeny out of a Belgian Shepherd bitch. Jock was bred to progeny of Hootchinoo and Zembla, and the breed continued its development from there, with Walden's guidance, by inbreeding on that foundation. Mrs. Lombard called her dogs "purebred Chinooks." In 1940 the kennel, the dogs, and "the breed" were sold to outdoorsman Perry Greene. Walden himself died in 1947 fighting a home fire.

Perry Greene Kennels carried the Chinooks onward until Greene's death in 1963. His wife remarried, to local veterinarian Harold Smead; the couple continued to maintain the kennel and the dogs until Honey Green Smead passed away in 1967. Smead, in mental and emotional difficulties, was declared a ward of the state and institutionalised. Greene's grandson, Peter Richards, stepped in to maintain the dogs, which were sold to a new owner in 1976, who then lost the dogs to defray boarding bills. By 1981 the breed was at imminent risk of extinction; but eleven animals were rescued by four devotees of the breed. Numbers increased from there, still bred from the same foundation of three closely-related dogs.

Pedigree continuity was lost in the Smead period, so that the relationship of today's Chinooks to the founders can not be traced exactly, nor can whole-pedigree Coefficients of Inbreeding be calculated. From the known pedigrees, today's "purebred" Chinooks have COIs of 30% to 47%; doubtless the true whole-pedigree COIs are higher still than that.

In 1991 the breed entered the registry of the United Kennel Club; prior to that, pedigree records were kept informally by Singing Woods Kennels, Harry Gray's Chinook Club of America and the Chinook Owners Association. Shortly thereafter COA made arrangements with UKC to mount a "Chinook CrossBreeding Program" whereby selected Chinooks would be mated to "dog zero" outcrosses from the original constituent breeds or acceptable working sled dog stock, to be followed by three generations of backcrossing to pure Chinook lines. All seemed well at the turn of the millennium, with things nicely on track for Chinook survival, with a solid programme in place to broaden the genetic base of the breed, reduce inbreeding, and add genetic diversity to the gene pool.

A living Chinook Cross male (Tullibardine Holunder B-15)

But Chinook fancier Rick Skoglund incorporated a new club, Chinooks WorldWide, and in 2001 enrolled the breed in the "Foundation Stock Service" of the American Kennel Club. He brought to AKC a database (replete with errors and inaccuracies) of well over 500 Chinooks; this was done without the knowledge or permission of owners of many of the dogs contained in the database. Since then, the question of AKC recognition for Chinooks has been debated steadily among Chinook owners and breeders. Another breed club (the Chinook Club of America, a new club that stole the name of an older one) contested CWW's position, reclaimed the database, and got itself anointed by AKC as "The Parent Club" sponsoring the breed.

Probably a majority of Chinook folk were well satisfied with the UKC registry and supportive of the Chinook CrossBreeding Program. CCA made soothing assurances that UKC was not being abandoned, that dual registrations would be kept up, etc. People assumed that there would be plenty of time for the Cross bloodlines to achieve "purebred" status.

Late last month, though, it suddenly became obvious that there may have been a covert decision to "fast-track" entry of the Chinook into full AKC status. On the 28th of April CCA Director Patti Richards posted to an email list the news that "there are more than enough dogs for the Chinook to move into [the AKC Miscellaneous Class] at this time." Once that move is made, full AKC recognition could occur at almost any time -- and if it does, it seems a certainty that the Chinook Cross dogs and their owners will be left out in the cold. UKC registration would, of course, still be open to them, but it seems a foregone conclusion that the UKC Chinook would die on the vine once AKC recognition occured. At best, there would be a permanent split in the breed and its gene pool.

What is significant in all this (and there is, of course, much more to the story than I can present here) -- the "bottom line," as it were -- is this: a severely-inbred minority sleddog breed is now poised to enter the CLOSED STUD BOOK showdog world of AKC, without the consent, let alone the wholehearted support, of the breed fancy as a whole. And AKC will not even take in the entire gene pool of the breed! The highly-inbred "purebred" Chinook already struggles with hip dysplasia, seizures, shyness, cryptorchidism, dwarfism, anasarca, and eye problems; yet that part of the population most likely to help mitigate these troubles is to be trimmed away and discarded, while a proactive effort to improve the genetic base of the breed will be halted and rejected forever, in favour of more of the tired old "breed purity" racist stuff -- and that in a breed which, given its origins in mongrel stock in the 1920s, can hardly be legitimately called "purebred" anyway! It all seems quite insane to me. A hostile takeover? What the hell else could you possibly call it?

It all leaves me wondering whether something like this might not happen to the Seppala Siberian Sleddog in another decade or so. Somehow, there must be a way to STOP AKC from swallowing up rare breed after rare breed. In 1997 there were 35 breeds enrolled in AKC's "not a registry" Foundation Stock Service, which is depicted by AKC as simply a record-keeping convenience for these breeds, despite the fact that all of them are inexorably headed for full AKC breed status sooner or later. Today AKC's FSS numbers 65 breeds, including my wife's Chinooks. Each one of these breeds has a very small population, for which the closed stud book and hothouse inbreeding atmosphere of AKC is genetic bad news! I DON'T WANT AKC STATUS FOR THE SEPPALA SIBERIAN SLEDDOG -- NOT NOW, NOT EVER. But how to stop this giant AKC amoeba that threatens to swallow all minority dog breeds?

Spring is trying to happen

It keeps trying to be spring in Manitoba, but it sure hasn't made it yet. I see tiny leaflet buds on the Siberian Elms that surround the house, but no real growth of leaves yet. I see a couple trees that appear to be starting to grow leaves over by one of the sloughs but I haven't traipsed over to investigate yet. The Canada Geese are honking around in pairs like they really don't know quite what they are supposed to be doing at this time of year. That's the way I feel.

I've been building doghouses for last winter's litter of Seppala puppies, who are now fully six months old. Yesterday Tatka and Tsarko "Sharkey" spent their first full day on stakeout, having been left out the previous night. They didn't sleep in their doghouses, but they curled up beside them and were quiet all night. It takes pups awhile to learn to use our doghouses, as they are on legs with high, smallish entrances (against the winters' snows). The coats on these little guys, they don't NEED a doghouse in most kinds of weather.

That's Tatka above, not letting the situation get her down at all, though she does resent not being totally at liberty. She has investigated the rebar swivel to see if she could remove it, and has chewed a bit at the chain and the snap, enough to satisfy herself that there was no way to use her teeth to gain her freedom. So, like the smart gal she is, she has accepted the situation. These two have been virtually trouble-free in their introduction to the stakeout, other than the usual chain tangles that need to be fixed while they are learning how to manage the chain.

The weather today is nasty. Drizzling rain, with temperatures only a bit above freezing. But the two pups are just fine in the shelter of the spruce boughs; it's the two guys left in the puppy pen who are wet and muddy despite their doghouse. A few more days will see them staked out, too.