THE SEPPALA SIBERIAN SLEDDOG
PROJECT takes the courageous stand that new gene inflow is essential,
not optional, for small breed populations of working dogs that have
endured the closed stud books of the American and Canadian Kennel
Clubs for sixty or a hundred years. (If you want to know why,
see our "genetic diversity" page.)
Seppala strain has been genetically
isolated since the 1930s. For three quarters of a century it has been
subject to repeated genetic bottleneck events, genetic drift, and forced
inbreeding. A new deposit to the Seppala genetic account is
long overdue. Yet narrow minds insist that new Siberia import stock has
nothing positive to offer! Mind you, nobody seems bothered about
introducing massive quantities of Seeley-derived mainstream Siberian
Husky blood, even though many of those dogs are a
lot further removed from the original Siberian dog than our chosen
outcross candidates shown below.
from the kennels of Sergei Alexandrovitch Solovyev in Ekaterinburg
These superb males add two more Solovyev lines to the Project gene pool,
assuring good genetic diversity for many years to come.
THE PROJECT OF GENETIC RENEWAL for Seppalas has been
undertaken carefully and cautiously. We bred one litter
from a world-class Alaskan Husky racing stud dog belonging to Terry
Streeper in 1998; the progeny were subjected to several years of highly
critical evaluation. During that time none was mated. In the end we
decided not to carry the Alaskan outcross line beyond that experimental
F1 generation, because despite the elite parents (the dam, our best-ever
Seppala leader, the sire a known producer of ONAC racing leaders), the
progeny did not meet our standards for metabolic efficiency, stable
mentality, and leadership quality!
On the other hand SHAKAL IZ SOLOVYEV,
our Siberia import, has sired three litters. We are very enthusiastic
about his get, but we only began to use them in breeding in 2005
although the first litter was born in 1994. We wanted to test this Russian
dog's and prove them thoroughly by our own standards and to our own
satisfaction. We have found much to admire and little not to like in them.
We are now integrating the Solovyev stock into an F2 generation and we
have imported two additional stud dogs bred from Solovyev and
Markovo-Seppala bloodlines in the kennels
of Pirena competitor Ramón Rojas in Catalunya.
Perhaps we have been over-cautious about our outcross lines! Among the first three hundred dogs submitted to the Continental KC registry there were at least twenty different half-Alaskan crossbreds. Presumably any or all of them are eligible for upgrading to "purebred SSS" status when their descendants reach the liberal ISSSC 93% level as measured by their rather optimistic percentage system. Yet the ISSSC utterly rejects our "recent Siberia imports," presumably as being "insufficiently athletic." Didn't Jesus of Nazareth say something about those who "strain at a gnat and swallow a camel"? For all that, one of the above outcross candidates failed to produce acceptable progeny, while the progeny of the other were highly successful and "athletic." Despite the hefty stud fee we paid for the use of the Streeper stud and the cost of maintaining six ravenous Alaskan crosses for five years of evaluation, we rejected our first "performance outcross." I think that not only says quite a bit about our high standards for new gene inflow, but also about what an outstanding sire our Siberia import turned out to be.
Inevitably someone will say, "but why don't you accept other bloodlines of Racing Siberian Huskies as outcross candidates?" We have three excellent reasons not to do so. First, it has been tried and tried, done to death, not only by Doug Willett and Lanette Kimball, but by just about every Siberian Husky racer for the past fifty years, and it has never worked out very well. Willett himself "searched for an outcross" for thirty years and abandoned one white hope after another. (Who enthuses over ROCKY OF ALTA these days? Yet fifteen years ago he was touted as The Answer!) The main result of some of the most widely-disseminated of the RSH outcrosses has been additional problems with such genetic diseases as subaortic stenosis. Second, the RSH never was and never will be a true outcross to Seppala strain, because it has the identical breed founders in 70% or more of its pedigree lines. It is only an outbreeding, not a real outcross -- and not much of an outbreeding at that. Moreover, in the usual Racing Siberian Husky lines such as Igloo Pak, Anadyr, and Kodiak there have been many more generations of inbreeding and random drift than in Seppala strain, hence much less remaining genetic diversity. Those who seek an outcross for Seppalas in the RSH domain don't really understand what an outcross is or why it is undertaken. Third, Racing Siberian Husky bloodlines are quite likely to contain unadmitted Alaskan Husky outcross blood that isn't shown in the pedigree. Here again is a source of unwanted problems, and anyway, we like to know what we're working with. If someone's pedigrees are not to be trusted, we want nothing to do with his/her dogs.
Thus far all the evidence we have seen indicates that Siberia import stock offers the greatest hope for the genetic renewal of Seppala strain. We are completely comfortable with that concept, because it is fully in line with the practices of Leonhard Seppala and Elizabeth Ricker themselves. The Project is now firmly committed to the integration of the Solovyev Siberia import lines with our Markovo-Seppala rootstock.
