Unique Seppala = Markovo Seppala

Copyright © 2003, 2005 J. Jeffrey Bragg

Seppala Survival

IN THE YEAR 1969 the Seppala Siberian came very close to extinction. Its future looked dark: the third Seppala Kennels, that of J. D. McFaul, had closed six years previously. No one cared about preserving their bloodline for posterity. Both the showdog people and the racing contingent had values that did not include these versatile all-purpose sleddogs. Within less than another decade there would have been no more Seppalas, had it not been for the impression that one ageing McFaul male, DITKO OF SEPPALA, made on a novice dog driver. As a consequence, Markovo Kennels' efforts to collect surviving Seppala stock and its continuation breeding of the McFaul/Shearer lineage enabled Leonhard Seppala's special bloodline to survive those bad post-McFaul years.

Now the survival of the Leonhard Seppala sleddog is in question once again, although perhaps few people realise that. Superficially the future looks bright five years into the new millennium. To all appearances, there is a thriving population of work-proven sleddogs called Seppalas, a new breed initiative shelters them from the constant threat of assimilation by the larger show-dog population, and public interest in Seppalas seems to be growing. The reality, though, is less auspicious. There is a dark side to the new interest in Seppalas that threatens their future.

The overall number of authentic Seppalas and their proportionate share of the loosely-called "Seppala" population has declined steadily in recent years. The thriving population I just referred to consists of part-Seppalas, mixed-lineage racing Siberian Huskies, really. Work-proving consists almost wholly of extended sprint racing (okay, they call it middle-distance, but winning those races is all about "extending the sprint"). Competitive dogsled racing is notorious for the short-term perspective of its values. That perspective is now promoted to the hilt in the U.S.A. by an organisation, the ISSSC, whose philosophy is to equate the racing Siberian Husky with the Seppala sleddog, denying that any difference exists, denigrating the value of the Markovo bloodline that gave rise to all surviving Seppalas, and dressing up Seeley-derived RSH stock in spurious inflated Seppala percentages.

Interest in Seppalas seems high, yet there is little clear understanding of what is Seppala and what is not. As a result, authentic Seppalas once more face extinction either through assimilation by the mainstream racing Siberian Husky population or via going to waste in a pointless, dead-end scheme to do away with the cost of AKC registration and to legitimise Seppala/Alaskan Husky crossbreds. Seppalas need a long-term perspective in order to prosper, together with clear understanding of Seppala origins and the real sources of the Seppala gene pool.

The last Pure-Seppala breeding programme in the U.S.A., that of Carolyn Ritter's River View Kennels, ended in 1993 with the dispersal of the Ritter stock; since then, as far as I know, no one in the entire U.S.A. has seriously undertaken to breed pure Seppalas. This is probably because what I call the "unique Seppala" distinction has been utterly obscured, for no better reason that to serve the personal interests of two or three large-scale breeders.

Haakon of Markovo, Markovo's Maraq and Xaros of Markovo

Pictured above are three young male Seppalas from the Markovo period. These dogs were indisputably pure Seppalas, derived from unique-Seppala trunk lineage. The parents of HAAKON OF MARKOVO were McFaul dogs. The sire of MARKOVO'S MARAQ was a McFaul dog, his dam a Malamak-line bitch whose pedigree was wholly McFaul ancestry. XAROS OF MARKOVO's ancestry was McFaul/Shearer with a small (about 3/64) leavening of Gatineau background. These dogs were entirely unique-Seppala in origin and ancestry. There was no need to calculate "percentages" for sleddogs like these.

 

Non-Unique Seppala

THE USE OF SEPPALA PERCENTAGES, first introduced in 1986, seems to have resulted rather quickly in widespread failure to recognise where real Seppalas came from. How did such a failure come about? Michael Jennings, in The New Complete Siberian Husky, wrote:

"...today some people still speak of the "pure Seppala strain" that emanated from [the Wheeler] kennel. In all fairness, however, it should be pointed out that, given the fact that almost all the early stock came directly from Seppala or related breeding, the dogs coming from this kennel were no more "pure Seppala" than those from most other foundation kennels, the only difference being that Wheeler perpetuated the name longer."

There are people who find merit in this argument. Showdog Siberian Husky bloodlines received such a hefty boost of Wheeler breeding in the 1930s that one really should to ask oneself where the true difference lies. Around half the ancestry in Ch. Monadnock's Pando's pedigree, for example, goes back to Harry Wheeler stock; his overall percentage of Seppala lineage background is almost 75%. For this reason, one is forced to conclude that Wheeler and Poland Spring ancestry are not unique, they are something held in common by all AKC/CKC registered Siberian Husky bloodlines, just as Jennings implies -- they constitute NON-UNIQUE SEPPALA CONTENT. Therefore if you insist on calculating Seppala percentages by going back to breed foundation stock ("back to the boat," I sometimes say), you must come up with a way to distinguish your own "percentage Seppalas" from show-dogs whose percentage of Seppala ancestry may be quite similar!

To cope with this shortcoming of the percentage system, various expedients have been tried over the past thirty "Willett years." Various "exclusion clauses" were advocated by Doug Willett: three generations of non-work-oriented breeding, three generations of Anadyr, Igloo Pak or Monadnock bloodlines, one generation of Zero bloodline. More recently, though, those who use this system seem determined to regard any racing Siberian Husky as a percentage-Seppala, even when it comes from frankly Seeley-based lines such as Anadyr. There is every evidence that percentages are no longer applied sensibly. Many Siberians are claimed by their owners to be 99% or 100% Seppala, apparently on no better basis than that they have pedigrees from kennels with "Sepp" names. Few people really know how to calculate Seppala percentage, not surprisingly -- the system has from the outset been esoteric and vague, and over the years it has undergone many unexplained changes. The current attitude seems to be that anything may be a Seppala if its owner says it is.

 

The Unique-Seppala Distinction

IT ISN'T REALLY THAT DIFFICULT to distinguish Seppalas from Racing Siberian Huskies. It's too bad so much emphasis has been laid on esoteric percentage calculations that can't even be checked and verified because only one man knows how they were done. Actually the Wheeler and Poland Spring lines are no longer vitally significant to the question. Too much time has passed, too much show-dog breeding has occurred using those lines as raw material, for Poland Spring or Wheeler ancestry to mean much today; Poland Spring and Wheeler bloodlines today are literally the heritage of ALL dogs stemming from the AKC and CKC Siberian Husky stud books of the 1930s and 1940s. The Seppalas that were rescued and preserved in the 1970s were not the Wheeler dogs, who were already long gone by then!

THE MCFAUL SEPPALA STOCK WAS THE BASIS AND THE OBJECT OF THE MARKOVO RESCUE EFFORT! To the extent that it was still possible, McFaul dogs -- DITKO OF SEPPALA, SHANGO OF SEPPALA, VANKA OF SEPPALA, DUSKA OF SEPPALA -- were used to rescue Seppala strain; others also used were direct descendants of McFaul or Shearer (Foxstand) stock.

Wheeler, Belford, Shearer and McFaul constituted an unshakeable solid centre, a strong trunk of Seppala breeders. They maintained a consistent policy for preservation of Seppala lineage from 1930 through the mid-1960s. They exchanged stock among themselves. They shared similar ideals. Each man had resolved to exclude Seeley-derived stock from his breeding. The Markovo programme simply followed the highway built by these previous major Seppala breeders. Markovo Kennels used for broodstock only animals that were in the direct line of descent from that main trunk, keeping exclusively to the traditional Seppala bloodlines (McFaul, Gagnon, Foxstand, Bryar, and Malamak). The example of the core Seppala breeders of the 1940s and 1950s was quite clear; no one need doubt that the definition and meaning of "Seppala Siberians" was generally understood and widely accepted -- until Doug Willett's 1986 book "The Seppala Siberian" removed the qualitative bloodline distinction for Seppalas to replace it with percentages, while Barb Petura's 1983 pamphlet encouraged everyone to mix Siberian bloodlines together indiscriminately. After that, confusion reigned.

Today the only pure-strain descendants of that historic main trunk of Wheeler, Belford, Shearer and McFaul lineage are the sleddogs now called "Markovo-Seppalas": those whose ancestry stems exclusively from the group of ten "Second Foundation" animals of the Markovo period:

These dogs were the purest Seppalas obtainable circa 1970. Their background was wholly from the bloodlines of McFaul and Bill Shearer's Foxstand (which was repeatedly used as a Seppala resource by McFaul). Two of the females (LYL and MOKA) had a very small amount of non-Seppala lineage through early Shearer breeding that was passed on to Gatineau -- but their actual percentage of Leonhard Seppala ancestry was still an extremely high 98.8%.

The McFaul and Foxstand dogs were UNIQUE SEPPALA -- ancestry NOT held in common with all the show-dog bloodlines of the AKC Siberian Husky registry! Doug Willett's 1986 book "The Seppala Siberian" states that "The heart of the Sepp-Alta breeding program became the Bragg Markovo dogs or descendants of those dogs." The McFaul dogs were the ideal of the Markovo programme, because they were NOT altered from the original type, were not tampered with by such breeders as Eva B. Seeley and her successors.
     The Markovo dogs were useful precisely because they were bred from the pure Seppala trunk lineage, rather than from mixed-lineage bloodlines such as Anadyr, Igloo Pak, Natomah, Calivali, White Water Lake, etc., whose claim to Seppala content was mostly through the non-unique Seppala breed foundation of the 1930s.
          None of the Siberian Huskies bred into Seppala lineage during the post-Markovo years have ever contributed additional pure Seppala content -- all, without exception, were mixed-lineage stock from various Seeley-derived bloodlines: Natomah, Smo-Ki-Luk, Kodiak, Komet, Foxhaunt, Vargevass, Wobiska, Ninnis, etc. Although it may be hard to believe, it is the absolute truth that not a single pure-Seppala line was ever added to the Markovo/Seppineau base of the 1970s by Doug Willett or anyone else; subsequent breeders have only diluted the pure Seppala trunk lineage. That was not because other Seppalas were no longer available -- in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Seppalas not used by Markovo, mostly from Malamak and Bryar lineage, were still readily available. Ask yourself why the post-Markovo Seppala breeders could not be bothered to seek out and use these dogs, but instead, just took the easy way out and used RSHs from Kodiak, Smo-Ki-Luk, Komet, Foxhaunt, Anadyr and other mainstream Siberian Husky bloodlines!
          Unquestionably good work has been done in maintaining and improving the racing abilities of the dogs. But I wonder whether it is really necessary to pay the exorbitant price of losing the core Seppala lineage, after all these years, just in order to expand the population in pursuit of a further competitive edge, playing the numbers game in the same old futile short-term effort to win races against Alaskan husky professionals.

 

Markovo Seppalas

THE CONCLUSION IS INESCAPABLE: Markovo Seppalas -- sleddogs whose ancestry derives entirely from the ten second-foundation dogs listed above -- are the only surviving representatives today of the unique-Seppala set (the McFaul and Shearer stock) that were so well known all through the 1940s and 1950s. But are there really any such dogs left? Of course there are! The problem is that no one bothers to distinguish them from the "100% wannabes" that have become so abundant! The abundance of "false positives" -- mixed-lineage RSHs claimed to be "100% Seppala" has obscured the fact that Markovo-Seppalas have all but disappeared from the sleddog population in the U. S. A.

Ninnis' Sabrina Two (100% Anadyr) and Tonya of Seppala (100% Markovo Seppala)

Shown above are two sleddog bitches. NINNIS' SABRINA TWO, at left, was a Bill Tolley Anadyr-derived racing Siberian Husky (a half-sister to the Ninnis bitch recently bred into a popular percentage-Seppala racing line). We bought SABRINA to keep her from being shot by her owner who was getting out of sleddogs and into dirt-bike racing. She was represented by the seller as a fast command leader -- but it was only hype. SABRINA was a reasonable command dog, but did not have the speed to keep up with our Markovo-Seppala leaders SEPALLEO and SEPALLOP; they ran her ragged. (She was hampered by a poor gait.) We kept her for use in training puppy teams, when we wanted to go slowly. SABRINA, I suppose, would rate something in the vicinity of 75 - 80% non-unique Seppala ancestry, using the back-to-the-boat method. Her pedigree was entirely from the Alaskan's/Anadyr bloodline of Earl F. Norris' "dual-purpose" race/show Siberians for three or more generations. There was nothing in SABRINA that would make the slightest contribution to a Seppala breeding programme; I had her spayed.

The other bitch shown above, a Markovo-Seppala, TONYA OF SEPPALA, in contrast to Sabrina, was every bit the equal of SEPALLEO and SEPALLOP. Tonya quickly replaced Sabrina at double-lead and since then has made tremendous contributions both to my team and to our breeding programme. I find it really hard to understand why anyone would deliberately breed mediocrities like SABRINA into a Seppala bloodline, when by itself that bloodline is capable of producing something like TONYA with no assistance from mixed-lineage RSH stock! I see nothing at all to be gained and a great deal to be lost by such a foolish breeding plan. Yet the whole thrust of "Seppala" breeding in the U.S.A. in recent years seems to have been to incorporate into bloodlines named Sepp-this and Sepp-that as much Anadyr, White Water Lake, Wobiska and even backyard-breeding as convenience or expediency dictate, rather than to make any effort to breed and select a larger population of Markovo-Seppalas.

That cannot be because pure-strain stock was not available. The sale of the Ritter dogs in 1993 released a number of excellent Markovo-Seppalas onto the market, yet there is little evidence that these dogs were put to good use. Markovo-Seppalas have been bred at SEPPALA KENNELS in Whitehorse since our return to Canada in 1993; currently we still have several dozen pure-strain Markovo-Seppalas, yet until quite recently I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of enquiries we received. Few people are interested, because no one makes the unique-Seppala distinction. A quarter-century of the esoteric Willett percentage system has effectively stifled any awareness that there is a distinction to be made. Ironically enough, Doug Willett finally came clean about his system just before Christmas 2007 on the Scottish Siberian Husky Club forum, where he stated, "The percentage thing invented by me was simply a gimmick"!

IF THE MARKOVO RESCUE WAS WORTH DOING IN THE FIRST PLACE -- which it most definitely was -- and if it is not to be in vain after all these years, then those whose intention is to breed Seppala Siberian Sleddogs must learn to make the unique-Seppala distinction, the same distinction that lay at the heart of the Markovo programme. All that glitters is not gold. Most of the dogs that are listed in various directories and websites as "100% Seppala" simply are not what they are claimed to be! Out of 51 "100%" listings in the first ISSSC "Seppala Directory" in 2002, there were actually only 14 Markovo-Seppalas. If breeders fail to distinguish Seppalas from RSHs, the Leonhard Seppala sleddog may be doomed to extinction in spite of the existence of so-called Seppalas in three separate registries.

THE UNIQUE VS. NON-UNIQUE SEPPALA QUESTION is explored more fully in "The Percentage Problem: What's Left of the Original Seppalas?"