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.)
They call it "the numbers game," and it is the universal spoiler in the world of sleddog breeds. Its effects are far-reaching, affecting issues that have nothing much to do with dogsled racing and people who are not involved in that sport. Dr. Roland Lombard defined it publicly for fanciers of the Siberian Husky breed at a talk he gave in 1982 to the Garden State Siberian Husky Club. He described the kind of breeding and selection processes that produce teams that win the Fairbanks Open North American Championship and the Anchorage Fur Rendezvous races and stated that a single top Alaskan 16-dog team might well be selected from over 500 fine dogs, and that the puppy base of those five hundred candidates would probably be over 1500 animals, and stated "it is a numbers game." On another occasion, Yellowknife mid-distance racer Grant Beck stated that he had to produce over 200 pups to get 5 or 6 replacement team dogs that would "make the cut" for his first-string team.
I call this "culling to the curve," or simply "the numbers game," in order to have a handy label for the concept. It is simply the implementation of the statistics of standard distribution of a variable. The basic idea is that you take advantage of the extreme upper toe-end of the Gaussian Standard Distribution Curve (the "bell curve"), selecting those animals that in terms of speed come out more than two standard deviations above the mean -- in practice, the top two or three percent. Fortunately for ONAC racers you don't need to have an education in statistics to accomplish this. You just run the candidates in a fast team to see which ones can keep up the pace; you keep the "best" and blow away the rest (while claiming that you find nice pet homes for all 197 of this year's culls, if you bred 200 pups like Grant Beck).
Now you might think that this procedure would make those three dogs very expensive animals, and if you could actually buy them, you'd probably be right. But you can't buy them. The breeder keeps those for his own team as they are the goal of the whole tiresome, cruel business. Since the other 197 can't make the cut, THEY are worth very little. Hence the unrealistically low perceptions of sleddog prices and values discussed in the preceding post!
Lest anyone fail to get the point, I'll summarise in words of one syllable. Any dumb shit can breed two hundred pups and pick out the best two to five of them, and can multiply the process or repeat it to produce an entire team of ten, twelve, sixteen or twenty dogs. And call himself a "pro racer." And many dumb shits do just that, encouraged by such books as Winning Strategies for Distance Mushers by Joe Runyan, "Iditarod, Yukon Quest, Alpirod Champion." Many slightly sharper shits will happily tell you that they don't do that, that they are such skilled breeders and trainers that they only need produce two or three stellar litters to create an entire winning team. If you believe that one, then they'll tell you another one. More likely that instead of doing all that breeding, they prefer to try to buy their team dogs from others, on the somewhat dubious premise that a dog that isn't fast enough for the breeder may be fast enough for them. Of course, with 15 to 25 elite-level competitors for these super-sprint events... duhhhh... the only reason that works at all is that ONAC and Rondy aren't the only sprint races around.
A great deal more might be said about the numbers game, but not tonight. It's already past midnight.
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.
I have made several unsuccessful attempts at an initial post in this new situation. I suppose the best way to deal with it is simply to start in the middle, in that most real of all moments (some would say the only real moment) -- the “now.” From there, I can move forward into the future or backward into the past as necessary for explanation and fuller understanding.
Let’s summarise the situation as it stands at this very moment, then.
First of all let me point out that all the noise we’re hearing at the moment is Internet noise. Facebook and blog noise, mostly. What has taken place thus far, with the exception of one actual physical event (to be explained in a moment), has all been in the realm of ‘virtual reality.’
Primarily, Jeffrey has altered the permissions settings on several folders in the CPanel File Manager tree on his BlueHost.com webhosting account. As my favourite American modern poet, Wallace Stevens, put it:
And yet nothing has been changed except what is
Unreal, as if nothing had been changed at all.
The net effect of those permissions settings changes has been to remove quite a few web pages from the Internet. For example, the “SSSD Project Forums” have been permanently inactivated. The “Siberian Husky Bloodlines” educational website is no longer online. The “Seppala History” educational website is no longer online. The “SSSD Project” website promoting SSSD breed development is no longer online. "SSSD Documents" are no longer available online. The "SSSD Galleries" are closed at least until I get time to refocus them as kennel photo galleries. The “International Seppala Association” website that I formerly hosted as a temporary service to the original I.S.A. incorporated in Canada’s Yukon Territory has been taken down. (There is now a new I.S.A. incorporated in the State of Minnesota, of which Jeffrey and his wife are not members. Ample notice -- four months’ worth -- was given to the new association that it would have to find its own webhosting, web design service, and webmaster, although that notice was apparently not taken seriously.)
My closure of the old I.S.A. website occasioned an irate reaction on the Forums on 12 June from the President of the new I.S.A., Mr. Andy Romness, in which (among other things) he accused me of “running a scam to inflate prices by limiting availability and not truly supporting a viable organization in the long run.” Andy and I had an unfinished dog deal, and it took three weeks to work out a settlement of that. As a result, on 3 July I met Shelly Romness at a provincial park near the U.S./Canada border; Windy of Seppala, Echo of Seppala, Xaros of Seppala and Shaman of Seppala came home to Seppala Kennels, WCAC identification certificates for full ownership of Beringa of Seppala, Vatyna of Seppala, Tsarko of Seppala, Nuchok of Seppala, and Maraq of Seppala were delivered to Shelly, a cash adjustment in their favour was made, and a memorandum and bill of sale covering the entire deal was signed by Shelly, Susan and myself. (The foregoing was the only ‘actual physical event’ in this latest SSSD dust-up.)
The “Seppala Kennels” website, of which this blog is now an integral part, will remain in operation (as will our Atholl Chinooks site). I am still hosting the W.C.A.C. website for the time being, although that organisation, too, has been given notice. The SK website and blog will now become the major sources of online Seppala information from Jeffrey. I am withdrawing from formal organisational commitments as quickly as I can consistent with maintaining good order, inasmuch as I now no longer believe that my long-standing goal of achieving breed status for Seppalas is a realistic possibility -- at any event, for myself personally. A succession of persons and events have proved to me beyond reasonable doubt that either the goal was unrealistic, or (at the very least) that I am not the right person to bring such a goal to fruition.
All of this came close to happening a year ago, when the websites were taken down for several days. At that time, I decided to give us all another chance to make a go of it. That decision has proven quite costly in terms of stress to my wife and myself. During that time I’ve seen little evidence that things are likely to change, so the scam accusation looked like a good point at which to admit that enough is enough.
It should be no news to anyone that Susan and I have been caregivers to more dogs than is good for us for the past two years. We have already announced our decision to cut the populations of Atholl and Seppala Kennels back by approximately fifty percent through dog sales, attrition, suspension of breeding, and rehoming. Please note that neither kennel is “shutting down” completely. We are keeping the best of our Seppala and Chinook stock according to our own very personal preferences; by most people's standards ours will remain a major kennel both in numbers and in quality of its canine stock. We may in the future breed an occasional litter or two if we feel that we have an assured market for the offspring. But we no longer intend to support any breed organisations, public registries, educational websites or breed promotion schemes.