Sno-Sepp’s Ely of Sepp-Alta, breeders Dave Pease & Doug Willett

by Anneliese Braun-Witschel, first published in SHC-Aktuell 2002

This male was the first Siberian-Husky that we imported (1985) in order to improve the endurance capacity in our kennel.

Earlier on we already had started to realize that the short sprint races would lead to a degeneration of endurance, in our eyes a vital characteristic of the breed.

With our team we faced this problem on many races first hand. Was the trail lenght not correctly reported and longer than the usual 20 km open sprint race courses in Europe, part of the team would make it barely into the finish line. This was also sometimes the case when I had properly trained for the trail lengths.

Analyzing our problem, we realized that the gifted athletes, the ones which could run fast and longer with less exhaustion, had these attributes genetically fixed. No intensive training could ever make up for a deficit in this regard.

1985 we were entering Ely at the breed club’s Körung, an event where  a show judge overlooks the phenotype and grants or denies breeding permission for the dog (German Siberian-Huskies need a breeding permission to receive FCI-pedigrees).

Ely’s long-legged, racy looking Seppala/White Water Lake type did not really impress the Judge, but he got accepted. Up to this day, the Siberian Husky type in Central Europe was  dominated by dogs from the Alaskan-Anadyr line of Earl and Natalie Norris and their descendants, as well as  from crosses with early on imported  dogs from show lines.

Ely did not have the fine elegance of the Anadyr dogs and was more coarse in head proportion, while his long ears tried to compete with the length of his legs. His body was bulkier muscled and he could run very fast. He was able to do this with less exhaustion and better endurance than any Siberian Husky I had owned so far. He was probably also faster than the vast majority of the Siberian Huskies in Central Europe.

Ely did bring new spark into our sprint teams and helped as co-leader in the Unlimited class to win the 1987 DSSV German Trophy. The years before he was active part of the victories at the German and Dutch Championship, as well as winning the silver medal in the European Championship.

His impact on the breed led to a high number of fast progeny. At times we joked that he even bred to a pot-bellied pig would produce long-legged offspring.

However, the mental quality and toughness of his progeny would be almost completely dominated from the character of the Dam.

After a while we found out, that less stress stable females bred to Ely would produce overly sensible pups. Those were fast, and easy to train, but missed the stamina and guts for distance racing.

Ely daughters from our own breedings, the ones which we selected for toughness, were bred to Hercules of Sepp-Alta. These combinations let us reach a  new level of performance  and were the mainstay of our winning teams in the years 1992-1995 racing in the U.S.A.

The speed and the long-legged athletic body of Ely, the bone substance, toughness and drive of Hercules and the trainability and loyalty of the early Alka-Shan generations had combined in an ideal way.

Over the many years as breeder I learned, that this was an extremely fortunate combination that in general does not happen of it’s own volition.