Okay, looks like maybe I still didn't explain it simply or succinctly enough. This is, after all, the world of 5-second sound bites, I keep forgetting that.
There are conflicts that cannot be resolved by everyone sitting down together and singing Kumbaya.
I do not doubt that as soon as Doug Willett and Jeffrey Bragg are both safely, definitively and unquestionably DEAD, someone will dutifully attempt some sort of initiative for "bringing all Seppalas together" for a "renewed sense of vigour." In my personal opinion, that will be a self-defeating enterprise.
Here's why: there is no general agreement upon what is meant by "Seppalas." I have defined the gene pool of the SSSD Project, the WCAC and Seppala Kennels quite clearly and exactly. (I had to do that to satisfy Ag Canada.) But that clear, exact definition (pure-strain McFaul/Shearer descendants plus new Siberia import stock) is not accepted by most people south of the border.
To illustrate with a recent example: one chap sent me a pedigree of his "Seppala" which I then researched to six generations. Within six generations of the dog in question there was not one single ancestor from any known Seppala kennel or breeding recognisable to me. A couple generations further back there was a handful of Sepp-Alta and Markovo animals, but very few. But this dog was nevertheless a "Seppala" in the mind of its owner.
Any attempt to include all owner-designated "Seppalas" in a single gene pool or registry will result essentially in a duplication of existing purebred Siberian Husky registries -- unless it is also opened to the Seppala/Alaskan crosses that were produced by Sepp-Lok and other western USA kennels in the past decade or so. In any case the result will be "Seppala" in name only, but not in genetic reality.
That is probably all that people want. If so, then they just need to wait for me to die first. Because I will never support any such thing, nor will I knowingly sell dogs to anyone whom I suspect might participate in any such initiative.
Mr. Willett is being rather disingenuous when he states that the split is not two-sided and that "There is nothing in the ISSSC-CKC (Continental) structure that prevents ANYBODY from melting together Seppalas from the two groups, or from the AKC group. As a matter of fact, some have been doing this. The CKC pedigree file includes the base Seppalas from all 3 groups, and can, therefore, register any qualifed combination." In actual fact, ISSSC does not want the new Siberia import lineage in its registry, Doug Willett has numerous times denigrated them as "performance-degrading Eurasian dogs" while at other times he has insisted that they were actually European Siberian Huskies taken to Russia and then re-exported. (He has no evidence, knowledge or personal experience to support either of those contentions, only his personal prejudice.)
The objectives of the three "groups" are not the same. They are widely disparate, in fact. ISSSC want to define Seppalas as heat-style mid-distance racing dogs capable of finishing races within 110% of the winners' times. The goal of the SSSD Project and Seppala Kennels was the preservation and genetic health of the Leonhard Seppala version of the original Siberian draught dog; racing was never part of that goal, although maintaining a good level of efficient versatile sleddog performance was. The emphasis of the AKC group, insofar as there was any degree of organisation or unanimity there (doubtful), is probably just breeding AKC registered Siberian Huskies with various amounts of recognisable Seppala lineage in their pedigrees.
These disparities have nothing to do with Mr. Willett or myself being hostile or unwelcoming to anyone in particular, or to Seppala newbies in general. Rather they have the nature of completely different goals and values. Nobody is trying to insult or exclude anyone. But nobody is likely to change the goals and values that have guided several decades of dedicated breeding, either.
And, with respect, I do not consider SledDogCentral to be a venue at which I would wish to discuss the future of my own Seppalas. My feeling is that there are too many folk posting there that haven't a clue in hell what they are talking about. I'm not the only person to hold that opinion; I've seen the same publicly posted by people with whom I don't get along at all.
Un petit d’un petit
S’étonne aux Halles
Un petit d’un petit
Ah! degrés te fallent
Indolent qui ne sort cesse
Indolent qui ne se mène
Qu’importe un petit d’un petit
Tout Gai de Reguennes.
-- Mot' d'Heures: Gousses, Rames - The D'Antin Manuscript
The SSSD Project never attempted to promote its Seppalas as racing dogs, feeling that this could only encourage exactly the kind of exploitative breeding and selection that are most damaging to very small tightly-bred populations. I always felt that Seppala breeding needed to be aimed at preservation and conservation first and foremost. Sleddog qualities needed to be maintained, but the kind of breeding and selection required for competitive racing teams could only result in a downward spiral of further genetic depletion -- the last thing the population needed. Therefore our breeding emphasis was always on maintaining a high average level of sleddog capability throughout the entire population, rather than identifying "bests," breeding only those and forgetting about the rest.
Nevertheless, the popular perception of Seppalas as "racing dogs" continued to create problems and misunderstanding of the evolving breed and its purpose. The three-way split divided the (very limited) Seppala interest group into fragments too small for long-term viability. In the circumstances, the details of the disagreements scarcely mattered, because the bottom line was too few people for adequate support of any of the three factions.
As things stand now, there apparently are no more pure McFaul/Shearer Seppalas in either the AKC registry or the ISSSC/ConKC group. Yes, there are still some "high-percentage" animals and quite a few claiming "100% Seppala" status; but none of them meet the pedigree test as pure-strain McFaul/Shearer descendants. (Perhaps there is a handful of old dogs still alive that meet the description, but there is no real breeding population unless someone is running a top-secret maximum-security kennel deep in the north woods somewhere.)
In Canada there are still breedable Markovo-Seppalas (around 20 at Seppala Kennels alone), plus a sizable population of former SSSD Project stock bred strictly from Markovo-Seppalas plus new Siberia import stock. They are bred as working sleddogs -- but not as racing sleddogs, which means that there is very little interest in them from south of the border where the "Olympics mentality" is deeply ingrained. But inasmuch as these dogs are not eligible for AKC registration, there is no reason to think that anyone could "bring dogs from both sides together to bring about a renewed sense of vigour to the Seppala."
In other words, I doubt it would be quite that simple to put Humpty Dumpty together again. Particularly if the people who think they might like to try do not even have an adequate understanding of the history of the whole affair. But perhaps, more likely, all that's at stake here is just opening another bottle of whine on SDC Talk.
The three Seppala factions, to make matters worse, were mutually incompatible both in values and in eligibility rules. ISSSC refused to accept Russian import bloodlines; the SSSD Project did not accept percentage-Seppalas; AKC rules excluded both ISSSC and Project stock, though both the ISSSC and the SSSD Project would, in theory at least, accept AKC stock that met their bloodline requirements.
In September of 2005, just three years after the founding of ISSSC, its major participants conducted an e-mail "breeding discussion" that proved, in retrospect, to be something of a watershed for that group. In that discussion a new member, biologist Frank Caccavo, ventured to question the hitherto unquestionable "breed only the best to the best" methodology, writing:
I agree that performance should be the guiding light, but this is an overly simplistic criterion in the absence of a balanced, genetically-sound plan for the future of the breed. For example, when I look around my own small kennel (and others), I see a tremendous dependence on the Seppalta studs Race/Ruffo. The genes of those animals dominate the modern seppala. I think we need to ask ourselves where we go from here? Where do we see this breed in 10 or even 20 years and how do we get there? How do we maintain or even enhance the performance of the breed while at the same time avoiding genetic pitfalls such as homozygosity and the resultant defects? Chris Rose-Anderson has described an appropriate strategy as always “breeding the best to the best”. However, this approach presents problems with such a limited gene pool as is the modern Seppala. I do not have any good answers.
Guru DW responded that he "totally believed" in the best-to-best breeding strategy, and also "totally believed" in "avoid homozygosity and genetic drift." He went on to remark that the problem was that there were "not enough bests" in the ISSSC genome, that the population was too small, that best-to-best would lead to genetic pitfalls and that mediocrity-to-mediocrity would lead to performance deterioration. He concluded, "It appears that we are doomed!" He then remarked that the Alaskan husky breeders "get away" with best-to-best breeding because of their large population, and suggested that the only answer was to "borrow bests" from the Alaskan husky genome.
Most of the last days of Sepp-Alta's breeding history was taken up with breeding and proving the progeny of an Alaskan husky outcross, "Rasberry." It took biologist Caccavo only about a year to answer his own question as to "where do we go from here"; he switched to Alaskan huskies and dropped his Seppala connexions.
It was also circa 2005 that Willett began energetically publicising the notion that Seppala "performance" should be defined as finishing mid-distance races within 110% of the winner's time. In fact, he proclaimed that they "were not Seppalas" unless they met that requirement! (One had visions of DW's team blinking into and out of invisibility as they lost or made up time on the trail.) To my mind, this was one of the most ludicrous pronouncements yet. After so many years of insisting that the sole purpose and raison d'être of Seppalas should be as mid-distance racing dogs, for him then to declare that they no longer needed to win, but could be content to finish within a half-hour of the winner of an eighty-mile event, seemed quite a turn-about.
It seems as though it should have been enough simply to admit that dogsled racing has "advanced" (if one would want to call it that) beyond the possibility of purebreds being able to retain competitiveness with racing mongrels. The mongrels have all the advantages: unlimited heterosis, a huge pool for selection, no requirements whatsoever beyond raw speed plus sufficient endurance to finish the distance trained for, and a user clientele with sufficiently low ethical standards to support mass culling. Seppalas with their tight gene pool and their low population numbers cannot and should not be expected to be competitive with the flavour-of-the-month racing mongrels, full stop. What earthly point could there be in institutionalising their status as also-rans? Frank Caccavo understood that, and decided that it was a simple matter of horses for courses.
The ISSSC and its guru, though, remained in denial, and focussed their attention mainly upon Seppala/Alaskan crosses as interest in their brand of racing Seppalas steadily waned. The last big flutter for Seppalas was their fourteen-year-old wunderkind Josie Thyr -- who just last month announced to the world that she was selling all of her Seppalas. The ISSSC still hangs on, but at the moment to the best of my knowledge it consists mainly of the Allan and Tamara Berge family.
In summer 2002 all of that ferment of discussion bore fruit in the form of a "Seppala Symposium" hosted in Seeley Lake MT by the arch-guru Doug Willett. Doug invited me to attend, at first via a third party and subsequently by direct mail correspondence. It was billed as a friendly get-together to "discuss the possibility" of a separate Seppala registry. The reality was something else. At the symposium DW and his lieutenants unveiled a fait accompli, a done deal: the International Seppala Siberian Sleddog Club and its brand-new affiliated "SSS" registry hosted by the Continental Kennel Club in Walker LA, a then-popular puppy-mill and poo certificate mill. A new website also appeared -- with Jeffrey's photos on it -- and the ConKC sold coffee mugs and teeshirts at the Symposium, also with one of Jeffrey's photos on them -- all used without permission of the author and copyright-holder. When I blew the cover on that move at the symposium and held up one of the teeshirts before the symposium group of forty people, DW arose in his wrath from the table at the front, lunged, and physically assaulted me. Well, at least that put paid to the pretenses of unanimity.
The ConKC Chief Operations Officer Mark Harrell attempted to patch things up. He and CEO Michael Roy actually visited Seppala Kennels for three days in the winter of 2003, were taken for dogsled rides by SK teams, and we agreed to try to work together for the good of Seppalas. This despite the fact that there was already an existing SSSD animal pedigree association in Canada, and that neither ISSSC nor ConKC had made the least effort to contact the SSSD Project or to ensure any harmonisation of eligibility rules, breed standards, etc., between the original Project and the copycat USA effort. Nevertheless, I worked closely with Michael Roy to try to arrive at some kind of compromise that would let the Project participate in the ConKC registry. There was only one ISSSC member, John Coyne from the UK, who would agree to liaise and to correspond with me about the details. In the end I wound up working just with Mike Roy and Mark Harrell. Every time Mike and I thought we had something worked out, DW would sail in and bust it up, threatening Mike by saying "sixteen breeders will leave your registry if you make these changes." Even so, we came pretty close to agreement, but finally the whole thing foundered when ConKC refused to offer a parallel club for Project people and insisted that ISSSC would have to be the only breed club. ISSSC for their part absolutely refused to allow any kind of distinguishing endorsement for Markovo-Seppala stock, and also refused to recognise anything bred from the new Siberia imports. It didn't help when Mark Harrell left ConKC, as he had been my best communication link. In the end, the effort to find grounds for cooperation resulted only in an impasse.
Thus I wasted a full year of time and effort trying to achieve a functional unification of the Project and the ISSSC/ConKC complex. DW and his bunch were convinced that they and they alone had the right to make decisions about Seppalas. They continued to ridicule me publicly on their website and email lists. And they asserted that their interpretation of Seppalas was the only one worth considering.
The ConKC registry continued to absorb US "Seppalas," many of them only vaguely of Seppala lineage. DW's "percentage system" was rigged to overstate actual McFaul/Shearer Seppala content in a big way, by "rounding up" at each generation, aiming at getting as many dogs as possible to "pure" SSSD status. In the end DW proudly confessed (to a German internet group) that the percentage system was "just a gimmick." But his gimmick played an important role in the recent history of Seppalas in the USA! Because so many animals were "rounded up" to 98%, 99% and 100% Seppala status, and because "Markovo-Seppala" was deliberately made a dirty word in ISSSC circles, the distinction between part-Seppala and pure-Seppala was entirely lost, quite quickly, in the first decade of the new millennium. Since few knew any longer the difference between pure-strain and high-percentage stock, soon no further pure-strain breedings took place, although the few remaining nearly-pure individuals were always extolled as having a "great pedigree." (There is not much excuse for this having happened; it is easy enough to distinguish a pure Seppala pedigree, because every single pedigree line will go back to one of the ten "second foundation" dogs of the Markovo/Seppineau period in the 1970s: Ditko of Seppala, Duska of Seppala, Vanka of Seppala 3rd, Shango of Seppala, Mikiuk Tuktu Tornyak, Lyl of Sepsequel, Moka of Sepsequel, Frostfire Anisette, Malamak's Okleasik, and Willi-waw's Gale of Cupid. But that distinction has been lost altogether in a wave of fake "100% Seppalas.")
At that point a three-way divide became institutionalised, in which there was the original SSSD Project in Canada and its WCAC association, the ISSSC/ConKC breakaway group, and a small continuing AKC Siberian Husky faction.
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.
Lance Mackey
Mackey Kennel Inc
Fairbanks, Alaska, USA
2010 Yukon Quest-Leader | 2010 Iditarod-Finisher
5 year old female - 55 lbs.
Bred to "Dred"
$10,000 Firm
Interested?
In the La-La Land of SDC, home of the clueless, the bumsteads, and the eternal armchair mushers, they are talking about Seppalas again. I would have thought they would already have covered the entire extent occupied in that topic (in their own minds and imaginations at least) in the long-winded 14-page thread of a year or so ago, but no. I don't know who most of the people doing the talking are, they are names I see only on SDC and nowhere else, for the most part, and usually pseudonymous at that. But the message is clear enough.
"What happened?" "What did we miss?"
It has been cruelly hot in the computer room (a MacPro should only occupy an air-conditioned office in summertime, they put out about as much heat as a two-bar electric fire) or I would have attempted to explain simple realities at greater length than I already have. Although, that said, I would have thought that there was enough info in the existing blog posts for an intelligent person to fill in the small gaps and figure out what happened. Guess not, huh?
Anyone who ever read a book entitled Atlas Shrugged and/or its companion volume The Fountainhead, both written in the mid-twentieth century by Russian-American author Ayn Rand, should have a head start on understanding just what happened to the SSSD Project. There exists in North American society a "looter" mentality (as Rand called it) that is summarised by the maxim, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." The needier you become, the bigger you win under that system -- if you're a paraplegic moron with sixteen children, you've got it made, but if you're a producer, an innovator, a doer, you become a helpless slave. As well as being needy and/or helpless, having the ethics of a shoplifter is also a big help. Ms. Rand's thesis was that the only defense the productive individual has in such a system is to adopt the "organised labour" tactic, to go on strike, to refuse to continue to produce without fair compensation.
TAANSTAAFL!
("There Ain't Any Such Thing As A Free Lunch.") In return for the large investment in money, time, energy and sacrifice of personal freedom that was involved in mounting the Seppala Siberian Sleddog Project, I expected others to put their shoulders to the wheel and act like something more than passive consumers. I also expected to be able to sell SSSD broodstock for considerably more than DW cull prices. Looking back, I fear those were naïve expectations on my part. Response was always timid, uncertain and reluctant when I asked for assistance with website management, information management, ID certificate production, the Seppala Wiki, or similar projects. But people were quick to DEMAND a "real paper Newsletter" for ISA (which none of them were prepared to fund or produce). Andy Romness and his wife did a creditable job of re-incorporating I.S.A. -- but then Andy bluntly told me: "I have been working to gain members and supporters but time and again I am told no thanks, great dogs and basic idea but Jeffrey is not someone I can deal with." After that resounding vote of no confidence, I withdrew from the new I.S.A.; and of course, took my property with me when I left. There was a wide variety of other complaints and accusations which, taken all together, made it obvious that Andy and I could not continue to work together. That, along with the fact that Seppala Kennels has repeatedly been taken advantage of by people who want Seppalas but seem to think they should not have to pay a fair price for them, or for stud services, or for anything else, convinced me that it was time to put the "SSSD Project" to bed for good.
As for the "terrific resources" and the "electronic library," now. (And thanks for the compliments, folks, BTW.) If anyone had bothered to actually take a look before posting (okay, I realise doing that is not customary), they might have discovered over two dozen of the best of my articles and web pages already re-edited and posted to "Jeffrey's Articles" on the SK website. MY CHOICE. And "Redhead," please bear in mind before your plans get too far advanced that Tamara Davis illegally ripped photos from the original 1998 SSSD website because she "thought those photos ought to be preserved" -- and later made them available to the ISSSC for its new website, not to mention for ConKC/ISSSC teeshirts and coffee mugs. And I trust she regrets having done so. I learned enough from that to assure anyone today that I will energetically defend copyright to any of the SSSD Project web materials, photographs, articles, etc. Unfortunately those are not "public resources" to be appropriated by whomever desires.
What bothers me most is that the people doing the whining -- just as before -- are people who are not friends of mine, in many cases their true identities not even known to me, people who never bother to contact me about anything -- yet who somehow have a feeling of entitlement to my work.
I would be quite amenable to discussing, with any person who dares to email me and sign his real name and true location, the possibility of restoring other educational resources to the web (as, for example, the "Siberian Husky Bloodlines" website), if I can be convinced that there is something more to it than a simple desire to get something for nothing.
Once again the subject of a "book" has been mentioned. It is a possibility, but similarly I would need to be convinced that the return on invested time, energy and effort would be something more than derisory. In other words, I don't somehow feel that I automatically owe a Seppala book to the people who never gave enough committed support to the SSSD Project itself to allow it to survive as anything other than a constant sinkhole for energy, time and funds.
THE DOGS have always given me all I could ask of them, and more, and they continue to do so. I cannot say the same for those who profess admiration for and interest in those same dogs. But I'm STILL willing to be convinced.