THIS PAGE IS A SOAPBOX, basically: a place where opinions can be aired on dog driving and Seppala matters. I'll be more than happy to consider pieces from anyone who would like to submit them, 750 to 2500 words preferred size. I'll consider anything, but I won't necessarily post everything. Those of you who were around in the "Seppala Network" days may recall that I always printed submissions as I received them without censorship; I can't promise to post everything uncut and unaltered, but I don't like to edit people's work too much. (If I think it's too hot to handle I'll just say so, rather than rewriting it to suit my own opinions.) So here's your chance to sound off!
Can't Get No Satisfaction?
AFTER
BEING IN THE SLEDDOG GAME since 1968, I find I just have to pity
the poor guy who gets deeply involved in dogsled racing early on and
falls victim to the assumption (so common in these days of the
"world-class athlete") that the goal of the racer must be to come in
first, ahead of all those other guys. This is a guaranteed, fail-safe
recipe for dissatisfaction and unhappiness.
Tying your own self-image to the proposition, "my
dogs are faster than anybody else's dogs," as described by Joe Runyan
in his book Winning Strategies for Distance Mushers, is going
to ensure that your personal satisfaction rate in dog driving remains
very low, no matter how successful you manage to be at the races.
Having a race-winning team is a perpetual balancing act in which
whatever success you achieve is largely temporary. One year you might
win the Iditarod Trail or the Fairbanks Open North American
Championship; next year you and your dogs are a year older -- and
there's a fresh crop of athletic young challengers who may want to be
"champ" even more than you do. If one of them has the bucks, the
dogs, and the drive to make it around the trail one-tenth of a second
quicker than you and your one-year-older team can, then guess what?
Friend, you're history!
JUST LOOK AT
WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO to make it to the top. One way is to buy your
winning team one dog at a time, paying from $1,000 to $15,000 per
dog, doubtless getting burned more than once in the process. That's
assuming it really is possible to assemble a winning team this way.
Most experts say it's such a tricky proposition that it's not really
practical. Otherwise you'll have to put up a similar amount of
serious front money to buy several top-quality bitches, pay the stud
fees, and try to breed your winning team.
According to Joe Runyan you should expect to
raise 250 puppies over a three-year period in the hopes of getting
"25 really championship caliber dogs" out of your breeding
operation. (That's with the best bitches money can buy and the
best studs you can pay to use -- we aren't talking about
backyard-bred el cheapos.) Through intensive training and
conditioning you must identify the 25 champs that will make your team
-- as well as the two hundred and twenty-five 'washouts' that won't
make it! You'll have to provide dogfood, vet care and housing for one
to two hundred dogs while you are breeding, training, finding out
which are the washouts and spotting the champs. You'll run yourself
ragged the year around, driving sixteen to twenty-dog teams on wheels
and on runners while you condition, evaluate and train all those
youngsters; it takes a lot of miles to do that with 250 green dogs.
Then, one way or another, you must get rid of the two hundred
twenty-five washouts, and the less said about that the better. (If
you're really capable of that, I don't like to say what that says
about you as a person.) Then you've got to build your elite
twenty-five into a serious racing team, hoping all the while that
they don't get sick or injured during the training and racing
seasons.
If you get through all that successfully, then
maybe (only maybe) you might manage to come in first at a major
world-class championship race like the Anchorage Fur Rendezvous, the
ONAC, the Iditarod, or whatever -- provided somebody like Curtis
Erhart, Egil Ellis, Doug Swingley, Eddie Streeper or any of fifty
other equally canny and experienced mushers hasn't done the same job
a good bit better than you did it!
ALL THROUGH
THE WHOLE PROCESS you will not have time to really get to know a
single one of those two hundred and fifty dogs! You'll never find out
how much majestic dignity your ten or twelve year-old retired
sleddogs have, since you'll never keep a dog past age seven. You
won't have time to pick a promising puppy out of the nest and raise
it up to be your personal pet and companion, discovering in the
process that it's also your best leader. You will undoubtedly
experience the mechanics of dog driving in a very intensive way, but
odds are you'll always be so darned exhausted that you'll miss
nine-tenths of the real satisfaction of dog driving.
A couple of seasons back I got letters from two
friends on opposite sides of the globe, each of whom decided to drop
out of racing competition in favour of just working with their dogs
in the back country, in a total absence of competitive pressure. It's
funny how much pure satisfaction these two people expressed with the
results of their decision. Seems like they finally woke up to the
realisation that they preferred the companionship of old dogs they
knew, trusted and respected, to the false cameraderie of the
competitive ego-maniacs they had been associating with at
races!
RACES HAVE BEEN WON WITH SEPPALAS in the past and will continue to be won with them, sometimes, in the future. Some people think that's very important. I don't, personally. What's more important to me is, that someone just getting a start in sleddog sport can buy a Seppala bitch, breed her right, raise the litter, and have a competent, enjoyable sleddog team right there without spending $50,000 or more to do it. In the bargain, he'll also get six or eight little four-legged people who'll be his most faithful friends for a dozen years or more. That, I do most sincerely believe, is a guaranteed recipe for sleddog satisfaction.
Breed the Best to the Best!"
Getting a good start in sleddog sport . . .
PROBABLY
THE MOST OFTEN-HEARD bit of simplistic advice to the novice
musher is that old chestnut, "Breed the best to the best"! It sounds
great. It puts whoever's on the receiving end in a position in which
he can only nod the head and agree completely with the wise one who
hands this stuff out. But when you look at it closely, it's hard to
pin it down into a meaningful breeding programme. It turns out to be
one of those broad-brush generalisations, so vague as to be useless
in practice.
"Best" in what respect? "Best" with regard to which
particular quality or qualities? "Best" in what set of circumstances?
And whatever you decide about these points, does "best" then mean the
identical thing both times that it occurs in this six-word
prescription for instant success? How far are we meant to take these
facile superlatives -- are we talking about the "best" in the
novice's own backyard, or the "best" within an hour's drive, the
"best" within a particular breed, or the absolute "best" anywhere in
the world, bar none?
YOU DON'T GET
ME? Well, let's take an example. Let's assume you are a relative
newcomer to the winter sport of dog driving. You've been doing it for
a little over a year; you have three dogs and a sled. Last winter you
managed to weld your dogs into something resembling a team. At least,
you can hook them up, go out and complete a five-mile looped trail
that they know pretty well, get back to your starting point in one
piece without major hassles and consider that you and the dogs
enjoyed the trip. The downside is that it takes you nearly an hour to
do those five miles and you must get off the sled going up every
little slope; if there are two inches of fresh wet snow on the trail,
you are on and off the sled constantly, or pedaling like crazy just
to keep your small team from grinding to a halt, looking
reproachfully backward as if to accuse you of cruelty. You wonder
whether you should really have to push the sled yourself so much of
the time.
You ask a nearby racing driver what your next step
should be, explaining that you think you'd like to explore the next
level of the sport by driving a team of six or eight dogs. He says to
you, "Well, the cheapest way to do that is to breed yourself a
litter. That way you don't wind up getting stuck with somebody else's
problem dogs, which can easily happen if you buy more dogs from other
mushers. With pups you get the experience of training them yourself,
which is good. But, remember, if you want good working dogs you've
got to breed the best to the best."
It sounded so logical that you never asked him just what
he meant . . . but later, you get to thinking about it. Out of your
three dogs, only one is a female; she's a Siberian Husky of local
show/pet stock. Out of the three, she's not the best dog, because
she's the first one to start slack-lining when conditions are heavy;
on most runs she comes back with her tongue practically dragging the
ground, even though sometimes she hasn't really done much work. If
she's your "best" bitch, it's because she's the only one you have.
You might breed her to the better of your two males; that's a
tempting option -- no stud fees involved. But you hesitate -- you
have already had enough problems with these three dogs. Maybe there's
a better way. Maybe you could breed your bitch to your racer friend's
lead dog; that's unquestionably the best male sleddog on Johnson's
Side Road where you both live.
SO YOU ASK YOUR RACING NEIGHBOUR what he thinks about breeding your bitch to his leader; you explain that you're willing to surrender the pick of the litter, his choice at seven weeks' age, by way of compensation for the stud service. He shuffles his feet, grimaces slightly, and says, "Uh, well, I don't know about that. I really don't need that stud puppy. I could charge you a cash stud fee. . ." You think, "Ouch," and ask how much he was thinking of. He replies that he'd have to think it over and hesitates a bit. Then he says, "See, there's always a possiblity that you wouldn't really get your money's worth with a breeding like that." After a bit more back-and-forth you start to realise that he doesn't really want to breed your bitch, even for cash money! He thinks the resulting pups probably wouldn't be what he considers adequate sleddogs, that they might reflect badly on his stud dog; you might blame him or his male for the unhappy outcome of the breeding. And you know what? The chances are that he's right -- at least from his own perspective.
AT THIS POINT
YOU MUST RETREAT to your own den with a cup of coffee, a pencil and a
notebook, there to take counsel with yourself in privacy, with as
much naked honesty as you can summon. It's time to answer some tricky
questions for yourself. First, you must recall that your friend is a
racing driver. Do you know any more about his mushing activities than
just that simple fact? Does he just attend small races in the
immediate area, or does he have a big touring dog truck that often
takes him and his team five hundred miles or more to compete in a
major race? How long are the races in which he competes -- five
miles, twenty, eighty or a hundred? Does he ever place first, or
among the first three or four teams -- or is he more likely to finish
in seventeenth place? (If it's seventeenth, is that in races with
fifty or more teams entered, or just twenty?)
More to the point, you now must ask yourself
whether you have any particular interest in racing. This
question is much better answered now, before you get more deeply
involved, than once you have a dozen or more dogs in your kennel. If
you decide you do want to race, there are other urgent decisions.
Race for fun, or race to win? Race in six-dog limit class, or in open
class? Race at sprint distances? Middle distance? Long distance? How
you decide these various options will deeply affect your breeding
decisions and your training. Admittedly, in one sense a good dog is a
good dog. But as a practical matter, a good dog team is good in a
specific way -- at a specific distance, in a particular kind of race
over a particular type of terrain.
What I'm trying to say is, you must somehow decide
what is "best" for your needs, before you can know how to breed a
team for yourself. That slippery, facile little word "best" becomes a
very hard thing to pin down as long as you deal in vague
generalities. You must get quite particular about your own
"specifications" for sleddogs before it will have any real
meaning.
If you want to race . . .
IF
YOU DO DECIDE THAT RACING is what turns you on, then you should
approach the whole arena of sleddog breeding very cautiously. As a
novice you know little to nothing at all about a very broad and
intricate field. Every competitive dog driver out there is busting
his hump to gain a competitive edge for himself over all the others.
Breeding offers one of the main areas in which such an edge can be
found. Trouble is, it's a subtle and difficult art that involves
comprehensive knowledge of recent sleddog racing history, major
kennels and bloodlines, individual dogs that have become genetic
forces, and how various strains combine to produce sleddog
performance. It can take years to master that art.
Remember that whatever it may cost to acquire your
dogs, whether by purchase or via the breeding pen, that initial cost
will be dwarfed by the eventual maintenance expenses (dogfood,
veterinary care, kennel facilities, etc.). It costs no more to feed
and care for excellent dogs than it does to maintain a yardful of
culls. Therefore, trying to economise on initial cost is a poor and
short-sighted decision.
If you are going to attempt serious racing, you're
well advised to lay out the money for a top-quality brood bitch from
a big-name dog driver who wins the kind of races you want to run in.
It may be a good idea to have another driver with a few years of
experience act as your agent, both helping you to find the bitch you
want and to complete the purchase -- big drivers may not want to
"waste" a good bitch by selling to a novice, believe it or not.
Realise that if the bitch is as good as she should be, she will
probably be six years old or more, unless you are paying five
thousand bucks or so for her. (I'm not joking; world-class alaskan
husky leaders start at that price level and can go much, much
higher.) Even at that age, you won't get her for two hundred dollars.
Don't take my word for it; talk to somebody with lots of experience
before you think seriously of doing this sort of thing.
Once you've got her, take your precious new brood
bitch and, at her very next heat season, no matter when it occurs,
personally escort her to a top-producing stud dog, the kind of dog
whose name is common currency in racing circles, a dog who has sired
the leaders on more than one ONAC team, for example. Stud service
will probably cost you another five to eight hundred bucks; it's
cheap at the price, but make sure you get an agreement for a return
service if the bitch fails to conceive a litter -- that happens quite
often.
If you go about breeding racing dogs in this way,
at least you'll be starting out right. Keep the entire litter, raise
them to adulthood. Don't get impatient and put too much pressure on
them too young. Let them do a lot of free running while they are
growing puppies. Introduce them to light, no-pressure work in harness
whenever the owner of the stud dog says you should. Be very careful
that they don't get spooked or bummed out in any way in their early
experiences. Don't make final decisions about them until they're
fully mature -- three years old, ideally. This way you can probably
avoid major disappointments and bypass two or three years' worth of
novice's mistakes, while you concentrate on learning how to care for
racing dogs, train, condition, and race.
You won't win the big races with just that first
litter. Your first serious team will only represent a learning
experience. If your experience with that first litter convinces you
that competitive racing is your field, then remember that the Runyan
parameters will then apply and it won't be just one litter
thereafter, it'll be half a dozen every year! Much more might be said
by way of expanding this topic, but let's go on to other
options.
If you want to have fun . . .
THE
FIGURES I'VE MENTIONED ABOVE may well have made you think twice about
whether you can really afford to take up dogsled racing as a serious
avocation. Believe me, there's even more to it than I've outlined.
Few people really know what they are getting into until they've
already committed themselves to the sport; it's regularly responsible
for marital breakup. But sleddog sport doesn't have to be that way!
It can be done on a more modest scale. It can be fun. It can be very
fulfilling and rewarding.
If that sounds more like what you were thinking of
in the first place, you should realise that the best way to keep
things in the proper perspective may be just to renounce the
proposition that "my dogs are faster than anybody else's dogs." You
can replace it with, "my dogs are authentic sleddogs, we go out on
the frozen trails together and we all enjoy it utterly."
To revise your thinking in that way will profoundly
influence your estimate of what is "best" when the time comes to
breed a litter. Breeding will still require a lot of careful
consideration, though, just as much as it would if you were breeding
for racing competition.
RECREATIONAL
MUSHING, contrary to what the serious racing fraternity seem to
think, does not necessarily imply that you have to keep plodding
along with those three lard-butt show dogs whose natural pace is six
miles an hour. Yes, virtually everybody gets started in sleddog sport
that way. I did. So have countless others, including many big names
in racing competition. Call it your initiation, if you like;
initiation experiences are often confusing, humiliating and
frustrating. Your experience with those first three dogs may have
been like that. You can't change the nature of those dogs, but you
can learn from experience.
Maybe those three dogs didn't really want to be
sleddogs. Or perhaps they wanted to do it, but they lacked the
physical equipment for it. Maybe something was missing in their
mental makeup -- so that they would quit as soon as conditions were
challenging, or so that they couldn't really focus on their work and
stay with it. These are usually the defects that afflict pet stock or
show dogs that innocent people acquire on the basis of northern breed
mythology. To be blunt about it, it's not worthwhile to continue
trying to practise sleddog sport with dogs of that kind, let alone to
attempt to breed a team from them -- not if something better is
available.
THEN WHAT'S
"BETTER"? Thankfully, that's not nearly such a tricky question as
what's "best." The major difficulty is to cut through the breed
mythology and breeders' hype well enough to discern the real
capabilities of the dogs that are available to a novice musher. The
first question to ask is: what is the basic nature of each northern
"sleddog" breed? That's a trick question unless you take it quite
literally. Not "some of this breed were pressed into service as
sleddogs in the Antarctic a century ago" (Samoyeds). Not "the
ancestors of these dogs were the basic transportation system of
various arctic tribes a century ago" (Alaskan Malamutes, Greenland
Huskies, Canadian Eskimo Dogs). Not "these dogs were originally
developed by the Chukchi tribe to carry a moderate load a long
distance, and even today a few of them are still used as sleddogs"
(Siberian Huskies).
The question is, "what does the population, taken
as a whole, do today?" Samoyeds: show dogs and family pets. Alaskan
Malamutes: show dogs and family pets. Greenland Huskies: show dogs.
Canadian Eskimo Dogs: show dogs. Siberian Huskies: show dogs and
family pets. Individuals of all five breeds are in use as sleddogs,
granted. But collectively, all five of these breeds serve primarily
as show dogs and pets. All right, then, how about Alaskan Huskies?
Primarily, racing dogs.
Something needs to be added concerning Alaskan
Huskies. It is this: that as an integral part of their primary
purpose, those who breed them take for granted the necessity to
discard culls and 'washouts' at a rate as high as ninety-seven
percent, in order to attain the performance target of their breeding
programme. Also to be considered is that in this breed (though many
people deny that it can be considered a breed) there are two distinct
levels involved: the 'world-class Alaskan Husky' (WCAH) and the
larger overall population of Alaskans found outside the kennels of
the Erharts, Swingleys, Wrights, Saundersons, Streepers and other
elite-level competitors. Genetically the two populations are quite
distinct. The WCAH population is restricted, tightly-bred, often
quite expensive to buy, and numerically small compared to the outer
population found in northern backyards and racing kennels
worldwide.
IN AN EFFORT
TO GET BACK to the original sleddog concept, the Seppala Siberian
Sleddog has been developed. Seppalas aren't show dogs and I hope they
never will be. Their whole reason for existence is to be useful
working sleddogs. Not just racing sleddogs, but versatile
multi-purpose sleddogs. The SSSD breeding programme considers a much
broader range of characteristics than just speed. (For a discussion
of sleddog traits, see "The Traits That Matter" accessible from the
"Documents" page of this website or from this link: traitstm.htm.)
The entire SSSD population, as a whole, is made up of sleddogs. (Some
part-Seppala-lineage animals from the previous Siberian Husky
studbook can be found doing other things, but these animals aren't
part of the SSSD programme, they are Siberian Huskies like the rest
of that breed, which also shares similar founder ancestry if you take
the pedigrees back far enough.)
Seppalas can be used for any reasonable sleddog
purpose. They can take you into and out of the back country on
excursions. They can race. They can carry passengers. They can haul
freight. They can be used for skijoring or ski pulka. And in any of
these capacities, additionally, they can and will be the most
faithful and affectionate friends you could ever wish to have.
The SSSD breeding and development programme targets
sleddog excellence, but in a totally different way from the
three-year, breed 250 pups and hope to get 25 good ones, methods of
those who focus only on dogsled racing. We, too, 'breed the best to
the best,' but we do it in a balanced way that results in the entire
population having a high average level of sleddog capability. We want
Seppalas to remain natural and to stay versatile. We want them to be
easy-to-handle, affectionate companion dogs that are fun to work
with, fun to have around in the off-season, too. We don't view the
recreational musher as a joke or a second-class citizen in the world
of dog-powered sport. We know that you can't breed good working
sleddogs by letting the show ring determine their characteristics.
Neither do we think that the 'playing the curve' methodology of the
racers represents a practical, humane and economical way to breed
sleddogs for any other purpose than world-class racing.
WE SEE SEPPALA
SIBERIAN SLEDDOGS as the "green breed" of sleddogs! What do I mean by
that? I mean that Seppalas can be, should be, and in fact ARE bred
following principles that are completely humane and
ecological. We try to breed our dogs in such a way that every
animal we produce has a maximum chance to be a useful sleddog, so
that we don't have that perpetual problem of hundreds of unwanted
'washouts.' We don't want to be part of the horrendous surplus-pet
problem that humane societies and animal shelters all over the world
wring their hands about. Moreover, we want to breed Seppalas in such
a way as to minimise the likelihood of genetic disease -- which is
the other horrendous problem that the big closed-studbook purebred
dog registries like AKC and CKC still try to pretend doesn't exist,
or try to assure everybody that it can all be solved by expensive
screening programmes. Seppalas are bred in a much more natural way
than other northern breeds. We are working to broaden the genetic
base of our breed, to put an end to the plague of inbreeding. Our aim
is to return Seppalas to the "natural breed" status that they had a
century ago when they first came to the attention of Alaskan dog
drivers.
Our ideal, ever since the late 1960s when we first
became involved with the descendants of Leonhard Seppala's dogs, has
always been the Original Siberian Sleddog. If that original tribal
sleddog is what has caught your imagination, then don't be
misled by breed club propaganda! If you want enjoyable, useful
sleddogs, don't get show dogs. Get purpose-bred, versatile sleddogs.
That's what Seppala Siberian Sleddogs are. And if you are trying to
have winter fun with enjoyable, co-operative dogs, that just may be
what's "BEST" for your purposes.
SEND COMMENTS AND SUBMISSIONS TO:
P.O. Box 21162
Whitehorse, YT
Canada Y1A 6R1
email: jjeffrey@seppalasleddogs.com