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The Truth About Their Origins
The Siberian Husky breed-club myths claim that the "Chukchi sled dog" breed was "purebred for three thousand
years." Of course, they offer no proof whatever of that claim. It's a myth: a belief-system, about as real as the Tooth
Fairy. And there's no objective truth in it. For one thing, the coastal Chukchi had a tremendously hard existence,
with regular severe famines. Even the late nineteenth-century explorers document famine conditions in which the native dogs
were wiped out. And we are told by those same explorers that the coastal Chukchi dogs were regarded as the worst dogs in Siberia,
largely due to the effect of the famines.
Siberian tribal groups were semi-nomadic, of necessity. A Chukchi hunter (or a Kamchadal, or a Yakut, who also had
sled dogs) might hook up his dog team and go wandering for long distances, travelling from village to village, trading as
he went -- and dogs were often traded. It is assumed, because Chukchi was the lingua franca of such trading villages as Markovo,
where the Ramsay import dogs came from, that all the dogs there were Chukchi. They were not -- Markovo harboured several different
tribal groups, all of whom brought dogs to trade.
Leonhard Seppala himself insisted that his own imported Siberians came from "all over Siberia" and not just from Chukchi
country. Anyway there is no possibility that any single tribal group could have kept its own sled dogs going as a "purebred"
race for even fifty years, let alone three thousand. So the TRUTH is that the original Siberia imports were a diverse collection
of dogs from several parts of Siberia and not a "purebred" race maintained exclusively by the Chukchi.
The Truth About Their History
The dogs of Leonhard Seppala were something special. Not because they were different from other original Siberian imported
dogs, but because Seppala respected their origins and did not want to change them into something else. The prevailing thinking
in Alaska in Seppala's time was that "native dogs are stupid and cannot be trained" and that it was necessary to crossbreed
them with "white man's dogs" for intelligence and trainability. Seppala did not believe that, and felt that the native Siberian
dog was well-nigh perfect for the job of pulling a sled in cold country and that there was little that he or anyone else could
do by way of selective breeding to improve that dog. Seppala's first group of Siberians came from the Charles "Fox"
Maule Ramsay dogs via Sepp's employer Jafet Lindeberg, and Seppala continued to import more dogs from Siberia. Indeed, he
imported Siberians as late as 1930, when Olaf Swenson was commissioned to secure imported stock for the Seppala Kennels Seppala/Ricker
partnership in Poland Spring, Maine.
After 1930 Siberia was closed to external trade and there were no more imports. Seppala's followers -- breeders such
as Harry R. Wheeler (Seppala kennels, St. Jovite Station, Quebec), Alex Belford DVM and his son Charles (Laconia, NH), Rose
Frothingham and her daughter Millie Turner (Cold River kennels, Beverly Farms, MA), William L. Shearer III (Foxstand kennels,
Boston, MA), and J. D. McFaul (Seppala kennels, Maniwaki, Quebec) -- took great pride in their dogs' origins and made a special
point of keeping their breeding entire free of the show dogs promoted by Eva. B. Seeley's Chinook kennels and Lorna B. Demidoff's
Monadnock kennels, and by the breed club that was created by the showdog contingent in 1938, the Siberian Husky Club of America.
SHCA authors like Michael Jennings customarily deny that there was ever any such thing as a "Seppala strain." They
insist that the entire Siberian Husky breed is descended "mostly" from Seppala's dogs. The part about the breed's descent is
true enough, because without the Harry Wheeler dogs, the Belford dogs and the Cold River Seppalas, neither Chinook Kennels
nor Monadnock Kennels could have kept a breeding programme going. Nevertheless, on the Seppalaside, the bloodline was
kept apart from the show lines, and was always maintained as working sleddogs exclusively, never as show dogs.
Thus the pure Leonhard Seppala bloodline, descended from Sepp's dogs and from Siberia import stock exclusively, was maintained
totally apart from the Siberian Husky showdog bloodlines until the third "Seppala Kennels," the McFaul kennel in Quebec,
finally closed in 1963. At that point, the pure Seppala lineage came very close to extinction. It was saved from that fate,
though, by the breeding of J. Jeffrey Bragg's Markovo Kennels in the early 1970s. Bragg and his partner Betsy Bush collected
the last of the McFaul dogs and their immediate descendants, and breed new young stock that facilitated the survival of the
pure Leonhard Seppala bloodline.
The Truth About Seppalas Today
Now today we see producers of "Snow Dogs" claiming that they have "Seppala Siberian Sled Dogs" that are "Markovo-based"
or "pure Seppala," and "registered with Canadian Kennel Club, American Kennel Club and Continental Kennel Club."
Buyer beware! The ONLY authorised Canadian registry for Seppala Siberian Sleddogs is the Working Canine Association of Canada!
In short, the unfortunate truth today is that there are more "fakes" on the ground than real, authentic Seppalas. And
in Canada at least, just to claim to offer Seppala Siberian Sleddogs that are NOT identified with the W.C.A.C. is a violation
of the Animal Pedigree Act, a federal statute the violation of which carries fines of up to $50,000. The only true Seppalas
in Canada come from the Seppala Siberian Sleddog Project and its associated kennels; in the U.S.A. and elsewhere, true Seppalas are registered only with the International Seppala Association, which is affiliated with the W.C.A.C.
Dogs sold in the U.S.A. as "Seppala Siberian Sleddogs," or sometimes just "Seppalas," are usually either just mixed-lineage
Siberian Huskies registered with the American Kennel Club, or mixed lineage Siberian Huskies (sometimes also Alaskan husky
crossbreds) "registered" with the Continental Kennel Club of Walker, LA (which has often been cited as a haven for puppy mills).
These dogs are not bred from SSSD Project stock, nor are these registries approved or associated in any way with W.C.A.C.
or I.S.A.
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