New Genes for the SSSD (5)

New Genes
Final Evaluation of the "Hop" Performance Outcross Mating
Copyright ©1998, 2003, 2005 J. Jeffrey Bragg

THE PERFORMANCE OUTCROSS IDEA got a very thorough testing in the Hop x Tonya mating that produced Seppala Kennels' H-Litter. In that mating our very best leader, Tonya of Seppala, was mated with a top-flight ONAC racing Alaskan husky sire from Wright/Champaine/Saunderson lines, a male that was a proven producer of front-ends and leaders on a wide variety of females, many of them unrelated to him. We felt we had every right to expect progeny whose performance and leader capabilities would, if anything, be superior to those of Tonya herself.

In the course of an Internet SSSD-group discussion, I mentioned that we had decided not to take the Hop performance outcross into a second generation. Someone then sent me the following one-line message: "Hi Jeffrey, I am curious as to what you don't like about your Hop offspring?" I replied as follows:

"SEVERAL THINGS, ACTUALLY. First was the realisation that the Wright/Champaine/Saunderson bloodline had also got itself bred into a corner in a similar way that had happened with Seppalas. I know that in theory an outcross of two inbred lines is supposed to be great; but in actual genetic practice, sometimes many different such lines have to be tried before the one cross is found that yields the desired result. In this instance, we didn't get observably superior progeny.
"METABOLISM throughout the litter was very inefficient when compared with Seppalas; they need a lot more food just for maintenance and don't seem to utilise what they get very well. I suspect they'd be a lot better off on a high-powered racing diet with heavy meat supplementation, but we are not into hyper-nutrition and one of the attractive features of the Seppala dog is its extreme metabolic efficiency and ability to get by on a much lower-quality diet than the usual professional racing feed.

"MENTALITY was very uneven in this litter. Each individual seemed to be "quirky" in one way or another. "Hoppy," the best male, was probably best, but far too independent -- if he spotted, for instance, ice fishermen on a frozen lake, he would leave the trail and head off to investigate what was going on! "Haakon" the big male and "Hippy" the tip-eared female were both very uptight about their teammates. Hippy could have been a leader, but was too upset about point dogs behind her; going out the chute, she would turn around and attempt to snarf at the points whilst running! Haakon would persistently poke and snarf at his brace-mate, especially in slow going. "Helen" the small dark female again could have made a leader, but had issues with going out in harness. Outward bound, it would take her (in any position) three to five miles to settle down, stop bouncing up and down and looking back, and get into her harness. Once she did, she was the equal of any dog half again her size, but I got the impression she didn't like team work all that much. Coming home she would be great -- until the trail turned temporarily in a direction that was not towards home, at which time she would look back accusingly and start bouncing again. "Happy" the sable female was the best leader after Hoppy, and was really good when paired with her dam Tonya -- they were an ideal pair. But she lacked confidence on her own, never really learned directional commands, and didn't make it to main-leader status, always just a co-leader really. Also she was very fearful of overflow and ice and would refuse to cross either one. The other bitch Holly was okay, but an also-ran. From parents like Hop and Tonya, I would have expected to get three or four crackerjack leaders in the litter.

"HEALTH was also a problem. "Hoppy," the best one, turned up with seizures one autumn in his prime -- and they were cluster seizures, he would have one after another for one or two days, then nothing for three or four weeks. On the third series of seizures, after we had begun trying to control them with pheno-barbtitol and anally-administered Valium as per vet Rx, he collapsed and died. Whether his death was due to cardiac arrest, cerebral haemorrhage, or what, I don't know; it wasn't worth a $500-700 necropsy to find out. In a couple of the others there was some evidence that might have indicated hypothyroidism; that's something we already have trouble with, so finding it in the outcross line was discouraging.

"Also a strange thing was that in their second season in harness the whole bunch were very fast, pushing the other dogs to the max, giving us average speeds 1.5 to 2 mph faster than usual. But in succeeding seasons, that youthful speed just disappeared and they were no faster than the Markovos and Russian-crosses, and a great deal less honest in harness, less work-oriented.

"When you breed a male like Hop to a bitch like Tonya, you expect superior progeny, and you expect great leaders. We didn't get either, so decided not to take it further. True, maybe in the third or fourth generation downline, we would get a bonus. But we don't have the resources to breed that many litters on spec. Overall, the experience convinced me that when you breed to "World-Class Alaskan Husky" stock, you get WCAH-type characteristics but without much reliability. WCAH characteristics include being real fast while they are young, needing a concentrated hyper-nutritive diet, etc. On the plus side, they had nice physiques, they were affectionate and bonded, but on the whole, it was a disappointing experience."

THE ABOVE REPLY is candid, detailed and complete enough to stand on its own as our final evaluation of the Hop Performance Outcross experiment. It was always experimental in nature, and (unlike some of the ISSSC kennels) we bred only the one Alaskan-cross litter (rather than twenty such litters), choosing what we felt was the best sire on the North American continent for our purposes. The experiment confirmed what Jeffrey always thought privately, that the WCAH is the subject of a great deal of hype and that the true Alaskan Husky reality may be that their superior performance rests much more on the "numbers game" of culling to the standard-distribution curve, creaming off the best 2.5% of the total number of dogs bred and blowing away 95% of the output -- rather than truly superior genetics. A hard lesson to learn, but it cost us only one litter plus a lot of time and effort.

FOR FUTURE OUTCROSS PURPOSES, we have pretty much concluded that our best hope lies in finding more autochthonous Siberian dogs of a type similar to what we already have in our Seppalas.


Terry Streeper's HOP (left) was bred to our best female leader TONYA OF SEPPALA (right). Their progeny, the two males and four females of Seppala Kennels' H-Litter, were our sole effort to evaluate and use the genes of the world-class Wright/Champaine/Saunderson lineage of Alaskan huskies as a performance outcross for Seppalas.