Outcrossing
There's much discussion and relatively little understanding of this topic. It should be self-evident (though apparently it isn't) that you are not outcrossing if you are inbreeding! All of the "cross-strain breeding for hybrid vigour" that goes on in Racing Siberian Husky circles is not outcrossing (and won't result in hybrid vigour), for the very good reason that it's still actually inbreeding, not outcrossing at all, from a genetic standpoint. The entire Siberian Husky breed goes back to the same dozen dogs of the 1930s: Kree Vanka, Tosca, Tserko, Duke, Tanta of Alyeska, Sigrid III of Foxstand, Smokey of Seppala, Sepp III, Smoky, Dushka, Kabloona, Rollinsford Nina of Marilyn. There are two or three others none of which would constitute more than one-half of one percent of a dog's pedigree today. So mating any two registered Siberian Huskies will constitute major inbreeding on some of the dogs I have just named. Seppala Strain lacks: Duke, Tanta of Alyeska, Sepp III, Kabloona; that's the only major difference, and in my opinion there's nothing there that is worth strain-crossing Seppalas with mainstream Siberian Huskies to access! Be sure you understand "outcrossing" within the closed Siberian Husky stud book is really just more inbreeding!
One earnest young breeder told me just after a forum discussion, "I didn't realise that Anadyr wasn't an outcross line until you told us in your talk." (Surely he should have realised it, though, when Anadyrs began to be billed as 70% Seppalas by ISSSC!) People just don't realise the true genetic situation in the Siberian Husky and SSSD breeds. So let's be clear on this point: there is not enough difference in overall genetic background to call any mating between two individuals out of the Seppala or SH gene pools an outcross, properly speaking.
A true outcross involves finding two dogs with no known ancestors in common. Now that's simple enough for anyone to understand. All right, it's true that eventually there will be ancestors in common, because they are both dogs. If it's sleddogs we're talking about, unless you are breeding racing mongrels, both of them will be northern-type dogs, which means quite a few more ancestors in common once we get back seventy or more years. But I think we can agree that no known ancestors in common for the past three-quarters of a century will constitute a reasonable outcross, especially when we compare that with breeding a Markovo Seppala male with a Kodiak or an Anadyr bitch that's 70 to 80 percent from the same ancestors.
The main reason that we would have for outcrossing in the first place is to counteract the constant, inexorable depletion of genetic diversity that is an unavoidable aspect of breeding purebred dogs. If you don't think that's happening, well, wake up and smell the coffee. Learn just a bit about population genetics, read the earnest discussions of genetic defects in the popular dog press -- and you'll know that there's no way to prevent it from happening, other than to take deliberate measures to restore the losses from time to time. This is so plain and obvious once you learn the basic genetic facts that I get quite frustrated when people attempt to deny that any such thing occurs, plaintively asking, "Do we really need new genes?" solely on the basis of wishful thinking without any knowledge of population genetics.
Once we accept that outcrossing might be a prudent move to make with respect to a gene pool that has remained closed since the 1930s and has reached levels of 30% inbreeding coefficient, we then are faced with the problem of deciding just where to go to find a suitable outcross!
We were tremendously fortunate to secure a dog like SHAKAL IZ SOLOVYEV, bred from Chukotkan village stock, a Siberian typical of the best dogs of the 1930s and not a short-legged hairy monster! I have been repeatedly challenged by sceptics on the question of SHAKAL's true origins, but I decline to dispute the question. I cannot prove where he came from or what he is. All I know that's worth knowing about him is as follows. He was represented to me as a dog bred by Russian expeditioneer Sergei Alexandrovitch Solovyev from dogs obtained in Chukotkan villages and taken to his home in Ekaterinburg, western Siberia. He looks very closely similar to CH. VANKA OF SEPPALA II and a few other Siberians of the 1930s. He is not typical of any present-day mainstream Siberian Husky bloodline known to me, and I've seen a lot of different SHs. (He was not the only individual available for inspection. I saw two of his littermates and several other Solovyev dogs. Together they formed a consistent group, very obviously related to one another, equally obviously unrelated to any existing Siberian bloodline that I was familiar with.) Bred to a couple of white pure Seppala bitches, he threw silver-grey saddlebacks that resemble Wheeler stock sold to Marie Turner of Cold River Kennels. He was a first-class wheel dog throughout his working years, always a serious hard worker. He would run lead sometimes but didn't like that nearly as much as running at wheel. His progeny have mostly been first-class working sleddogs, many of them first-string material. He hasn't thrown odd or disappointing progeny. All in all, I'd have to say that he has been our best stud dog thus far. SHAKAL IZ SOLOVYEV has been thoroughly worthwhile and I expect his progeny to be a continuing influence in our breeding. We were lucky!
My one other experience with outcrossing was to breed my best female leader, TONYA OF SEPPALA, to a world-class Alaskan Husky racing leader and stud dog, Terry Streeper's "Hop." Hop was a Wright/ Champaine/ Saunderson Alaskan, very much the original "Alaskan village dog" type of the 1950s, built to the Siberian blueprint. I got a fine litter of six, each one a distinct individual in terms of mentality and appearance. I found those Alaskan outcross progeny a lot more tricky to handle than pure Seppalas or than SHAKAL's progeny; it was difficult to make up my mind about them. At two years of age, they were adding 1.5 to 2 m.p.h. to my team's basic pace on most runs. But it didn't last; they got slower, not faster as they aged to what should have been their prime. Their metabolisms, too, were much less efficient than that of my Seppalas; they needed much more food, of much higher quality, just for maintenance. And every single one of that litter had a mental quirk of one sort or another. From such a mating of two elite leaders I felt I could expect at least three or four good lead dogs. I got only two, neither of them nearly as good as Tonya their dam; Happy the sable bitch formed half of a perfect lead pair when run with her mother -- but she lacked the self-confidence to become a main leader in her own right and was unreliable paired with anyone but Tonya. Hoppy the spectacled male was fast and driving, particularly if he knew there was another team on the trail ahead of him; but much too independent -- he would leave the trail on a frozen lake, for example, to have a closer look at some ice fishermen seen at a distance on the opposite shore! Then he began having cluster seizures at age five, collapsed and died the third time he had them. Two of the others had difficulties getting along amicably with teammates. The litter was a disappointment to us.
In the end, the quirky mentalities and the performance slump after early maturity led us to decide not to take the Hop outcross line any further. We might or might not have had an improvement in the second or third generation of breeding back to Markovo Seppalas, but if we had taken that risk and it had not worked out, by the third generation we would have been unable to do much to correct the error -- not being a large enough kennel to maintain one outcross bloodline in "quarantine" from our mainstream for three generations whilst doing insurance breedings with other lines in case of failure. Of our two outcrosses, the Shakal line had much more to offer and much less going against it; therefore it was the one where the risk/reward ratio was in our favour. We had to go with what was working, rather than with what was not.
The concluding point that I wish to make about outcrossing is that, if you try it you had better be an experienced breeder and know exactly what you are doing. You need to select the outcross animal by ridiculously high standards! There is no point whatever in outcrossing to the first Alaskan racing cull you run across. That's what is now happening in the ISSSC registry. Several breeders are running tandem Seppala and Alaskan Husky operations and mixing the two in ConKC's "MISC Seppala/AH" registry category. When a significant number of these wild-card outcrosses reach the magic ISSSC upgrade level of 93% and suddenly become non-percentage "pure Seppalas", all sorts of weird and unpredictable results will then start to emerge from breedings when both "pure Seppala" parents carry an Alaskan out-line. (All the more so since the crossed lines will be bred to RSH-crossed mates, there being so few pure Markovo Seppalas left for backcrossing.) Anyway, whatever the source of an outcross animal, for an SSSD breeding programme, I would want it to be such that I could put it in the middle of my dogyard and nobody would realise that it wasn't just another one of my homebred Seppalas. What we have now in Seppala Strain is too precious to risk its integrity by breeding it to anything that isn't a perfect assortative mating, so close to the Seppala type that it's hard to spot much visual difference in the progeny. It's an upstream fight to maintain this ideal, though, because people forever take the easy way out and breed whatever is in local backyards, justifying their laziness after the fact with "cross-strain breeding" and "percentage Seppala" arguments.
Pedigrees and How to Use Them
Few people seem to know how to make good use of a pedigree. It's not that hard. To start with, you need more than the usual three or four generations. I like to work with six-generation pedigrees, which will fit on one sheet of paper (any more than that takes more space than a letter-size sheet). With only three or four generations you are apt to miss around half the significant relationships in the pedigree..
The first thing to keep firmly in mind when you look at a pedigree is that the crucial relationships in an individual animal's breeding are those between his sire and his dam. EACH DOG GETS HALF HIS GENES FROM HIS SIRE AND HALF FROM HIS DAM, and that's about all that you can say for certain! Each great-grandparent, for example, will tend to contribute around one-eighth or 12.5% of the dog's genetic heritage, but it's only a tendency! Each reproductive event, each mating of a sire and a dam, is a new ball game; their separate genomes become mixed in the progeny, and it can be difficult to sort them out again! Inbreeding, too, happens between the sire and the dam. A bitch can be heavily inbred, for example, with a 50% inbreeding coefficient, but if you breed her to an unrelated male, the inbreeding coefficient for the progeny returns to zero for that generation and it's not an inbred mating! So when you look at a pedigree, your eyes should keep going back and forth between the sire's side and the dam's side, comparing and contrasting what you find in the ancestry of each of them.
To illustrate, perhaps my bitch is heavily inbred on BEOWULF and I am considering breeding her to a son of my Siberia import dog SHAKAL. Well, if it were SHAKAL himself I were breeding to, I wouldn't be concerned about the bitch's inbreeding on BEOWULF, because the Russian dog has no possible connection there. But in the case of his son, I must look to see who his dam was! Was it ZIRCONIA OF SEPP-ALTA? If so, she was a BEOWULF daughter, so there will still be inbreeding on BEOWULF in this mating despite the outcross contribution of the Russian. Do you see the point? The SHAKAL son might be progeny of an outcross, but his whole pedigree has to be considered to see what other correspondences there might be with the bitch.
We know that when we examine any Seppala pedigree we are going to turn up a lot of repetitions of familiar names. It can be confusing, because it starts to look like the dogs are all double-first-cousins to one another, no matter who their parents are. (If that's how it looks, it's largely because that's how it is!) But can we manage somehow to quantify these influences so that we can compare one potential mating with another? Sure we can. But not everybody knows how to go about it.
The German Shepherd people know. They use a simple system that works very well. Pick an ancestor who repeats in the pedigree between the sire's side and the dam's side. Write his name down on paper. Then start at the top of the pedigree (the paternal great-great-great-great-grandsire in a six-generation pedigree) and work your way down. Each time you come to that ancestor's name, note which generation it occurs in (3rd, 5th, 6th) and on your sheet of paper put down that number; separate the numbers with commas until you reach the great divide, the point where the sire's pedigree stops and the dam's begins. At that point, to mark the division between sire's and dam's side, put a hyphen in your list of numbers. Then carry on with the dam's side, working down and writing down generation numbers where the repetitions occur. You might come up with something like this: BEOWULF: 3, 5, 5 - 4, 4. That says BEOWULF was found five times in the pedigree, once in the third generation and twice in the fifth on the sire's side, and twice in the fourth generation on the dam's side. From this information you can, if you like, calculate a percentage of influence for BEOWULF. A 1 is worth 50%, a 2 is worth 25%, 3 = 12.5%, 4 = 6.25%, 5 = 3.125%, and each 6 is worth 1.56125%. (One 3 = two 4s = four 5s, etc.) In the case of our imaginary pedigree example, BEOWULF's influence is equal to 31.25%. Once you've done that, look for another ancestor who repeats, and do the same routine. When you have finished, you'll have a list of the ancestors who receive inbreeding emphasis in that particular pedigree; you'll have a relative percentage figure for each, you'll know how far back in the pedigree you find them, and you'll know which side of the pedigree has how much of each ancestor. Also, and perhaps just as significant, you'll know which ancestors don't repeat between the sire and the dam and that's useful information, too.
Having done your pedigree analysis, you then want to make it your business to find out as much as you can about the dogs that most influence that pedigree, so that you have a better idea what you are emphasising in that breeding. Otherwise, they are only names on paper to you; that's why many people don't see the point of pedigrees. They don't know the dogs, maybe because they've only been in the game for a year or so, or maybe because they don't have the energy to dig the information out.
I said to know "what you are emphasising in that breeding," because that's the main use of a pedigree. It's not something to crow about, saying "my dog's pedigree has blah-blah sixteen times." It's a tool for comparing the ancestry of a bitch with the ancestry of a male that you are thinking about possibly breeding her to. All its usefulness comes before the fact of the mating. Once you've done the mating and the bitch is pregnant, it's too late to think about the pedigree, because it's fixed for all time. The only really important pedigree is the one that you have to put the stud dog's pedigree on the table just above your bitch's pedigree in order to see!
That's how you use pedigrees; it's got its limitations. You certainly want to have a good hard look at your bitch and a good hard look at her potential mate, to see how they stack up against one another, whether they balance one another's characteristics or just reinforce bad traits. You want to compare their respective working ability. You want to compare their temperaments. Looking at the pedigree isn't going to help with any of that. I find these days that I use my pedigrees mostly to tell me which dogs I shouldn't mate to one another. I don't like to go closer than 3 - 3 on any particular ancestor, unless I simply have no other options. 3 - 3 is 25% for that particular ancestor and that's more than enough, unless he/she has the excuse of being the sire or the dam! The percentage of influence for the sire in a father-daughter mating, in contrast, is 75%! Grandsire to granddaughter mating, still 62.5%! No stud dog is that perfect, that you can afford to just throw out most of the potential influence of the dam. (When I was young and foolish, the first thing I did with Ditko of Seppala -- it was before I owned him -- was to breed him to his daughter. That breeding was a complete waste of time and it taught me a lesson: just because a dog is a grand dog, doesn't mean that you'll improve matters any by breeding him to his daughters or granddaughters.)
So make good use of your pedigrees; maybe then your own breeding will be a lot more sensible than much of what you see when you look through those old issues of breed club newsletters..
Performance Breeding
This is the nitty-gritty of sleddog breeding. Especially Seppalas. We define Seppalas as working sleddogs before anything else. Without performance breeding, they have no credibility. Don't think it's easy! It's easy to think about it, but difficult to put it into practice. A person tends to make excuses for his dogs. Excuses are totally invisible in what comes out of the whelping box, though. So the first and most basic principle has to be to breed tight tuglines to tight tuglines. But that's not enough -- would that it were! Even so, it's amazing how often this principle gets violated. I could hardly believe it when Doug Willett advised me to make stud use of a dog (his breeding, naturally) that wouldn't get on its tugline! The dog's name was EGO OF SEPP-ALTA; he was sired by Denisov of Togolaska, whose bloodline I had wanted to include in our breeding. I never could quite bring myself to breed from Ego, even though the dog's bloodlines could theoretically have been quite useful to me. But I couldn't see the point: why waste three years or so of care, training and feeding on a litter of pups that might not want to get down and pull when it counted? DW made excuses for that dog, of course: some idiot long-distance driver ruined him by trying to make him go too far with too little conditioning. That's my point: it's always possible to make excuses for a dog's poor performance. Make all the excuses you like. Feed that dog for as long as you must. Just don't let him mate any bitches! (In the end I tried three separate times to include the Denisov line, and each time the attempt failed because the representative I acquired lacked a serious working mentality. I no longer have any interest in that line, and the case only goes to show how suspicious one should be when excuses are made for a dog's deficiencies in harness.)
That's another point in performance breeding. Breed what you are comfortable with, breed the dogs in whom you place considerable confidence. That way, at least, you'll have peace of mind; you won't be forever worrying that the pups out of such-and-such a litter might fail you in some way, because of what you know about their parents. If what you know about their parents is that disturbing, just don't mate them. Nobody's forcing you! Even if you did pay a lot of good money for that dog that turned out to be a disappointment, why throw good money after bad, compounding your error by breeding litters you'll only mistrust forever after? TRUST is a big part of dog-driving. I'd hate to drive a team of dogs I couldn't trust.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that performance breeding just means breeding racing dogs, or that performance proving is automatically taken care of because you race your dogs. An uncritical kind of "jock mentality" just gets you into trouble eventually. Those whose main concern is speed quite often tend to ignore other performance traits that should not be ignored. Breeding for speed alone tends to produce "floaters," dogs who blast along at a fast basic pace without ever pulling on their tuglines. You find out whether you have working sleddogs or just floaters the first time you take your team out when six inches of heavy wet snow has just fallen on the trail and nobody has broken it out yet. Or when you are racing in the mountains and suddenly as you gain some altitude there's a foot and a half of loose powder snow lying around. Performance is not just a synonym for speed. It has a lot more to do with making the best of it no matter what kind of conditions are found on the trail. That kind of performance breeding is a true challenge.
Another point is to watch out for drawbacks in otherwise good dogs. In fact, this is the stickiest point of performance breeding, in my experience. It's easy enough to pick out the fast dogs. It's easy to spot the consistent hard pullers. Anybody can do it. It's the drawbacks that trip you up. That hard puller may also be the dog that flops down on his belly after every run, the dog you are always having to watch carefully to see that he doesn't poop out on you. Chances are he'll throw that; maybe all his male progeny will be forever on and off their tuglines, because their physiological equipment is letting them down in some way. Another example is the dog who's very fast, but gets scared on a long downhill run even though he's adequately conditioned and has never been dragged downhill or traumatised in any way. Or the dog that is so eager to go that when the team is forced by conditions to slow up, he turns on his bracemate and starts snarfing at him. Drawbacks!
Another classic example -- I hasten to say I've never seen this one in Seppalas, thank goodness, this was in another highly-prized Racing Siberian Husky bloodline, bred for six generations by one big-name driver -- is the dog that is just fine most of the time, fast and eager, but every so often he just folds up and refuses to run, letting himself be dragged by the team, sometimes just a hundred yards out of the chute. That's genetic, believe it or not; I saw three separate individuals from the same bloodline pull that stunt!
If the dog has a "drawback" and you still want to breed him or her -- you may have to, since there are no perfect dogs -- make sure, at least, that you aren't mating that dog with a partner that has ever shown the least tendency toward the same drawback. In fact, you want to pick another personality-type altogether from your problem dog, because you can't be sure what else the problem may be linked with. The wild, eager dog that snarfs his bracemate ought to be bred to a mate that is more of a calm, steady, long-haul worker who never gets excessively excited about the whole business, but just sees it as all in a day's work. Otherwise, you may eventually end up with a team of wild, raving, snarling maniacs that are virtually uncontrollable!
It isn't all speed, folks, even if you are breeding just for purposes of sleddog racing. (In fact, some of the more spectacular "drawback" traits I've mentioned, like snarfing at bracemates and folding up and refusing to run, seem to be closely associated with racing breeding and are, in fact, symptoms of mental instability caused by breeding for speed alone.) Control is vital. You can perhaps get away with having two or three all-out boneheads in the team, dogs who know nothing but run-like-crazy, but if you get a whole team of them, I can predict what your time will be in any race: DNF! You need brains, but even more than brains, you need cooperation. That's why my TONYA has been so valuable as a leader: she's highly cooperative. She likes to run fast, yes. But she wants to keep me happy, which is an even more valuable trait than speed, because it means that I can trust her most of the time to attempt to do the best thing in the circumstances. One of the most valuable Seppala traits is their general level-headedness and cooperation. Let's do our best to keep it that way.
