Public statement from Michael Jennings. Harris, As I Knew Him I first heard of Harris Dunlap when he was lecturing to various kennel clubs with the basic argument that Peggy Koehler and Lorna Demidoff had ruined the Siberian Husky. Since these ladies had been my first mentors, I wanted to meet Harris and hear what he had to say. I visited him twice, staying for two days each time. The second time I introduced him to Kathleen Kanzler of Innisfree Kennels, which was a little like introducing oil to water, but for me quite educational. I think it was 1979 or 80, and there were about 175 dogs there, varying in breed type from shepherd-type to Saluki-ish animals, but with a core of vaguely Siberian-ish dogs with fairly short coats, somewhat sloping toplines, quite noticeable wheel-backs, and erect or semi-erect ears. Years later, Charlie Belford, Harris’s principal mentor, told me that Harris had invited him and Natalie Norris to the kennel on separate occasions and asked each to point out the most Siberian looking of his dogs, and each had pointed to the same dog, which became the dog most central to his breeding program—thus the vaguely Siberian look of that core of dogs. Harris did not really believe in the concept of purebred dogs and thought dogs should simply be named for the dog yard they came from—Jennings dogs, Dunlap dogs, etc. He also felt that Thoroughbred horses were woefully unhealthy due to inbreeding. He preferred the emphasis on hybrid vigor found in the breeding practices of European Warm Bloods, and he vigorously espoused those practices. So it was not particularly surprising to me when he said he was sending dogs to Scandinavia with purebred registration papers because people in Scandinavia preferred to import dogs with papers. „Of course“, he said, „if you tell anyone, I will deny it.“ And I, of course, never imagined that nearly 40 years later, long after Harris retired, it would become such an enormouse issue. Harris was an extremely able dog man from whom I learned a number of important things. On the first day of a visit, he would spend a good deal of time degrading the Siberian as hopelessly inferior and degenerate, but if you stayed a second day, you would hear things like „You know that Siberian freckled foot; that’s a very good foot,“ and „You know, it’s hard to beat the Siberian metabolism...“ and things like that. And when I said to him once, „Well, Harris, I think you’re just reinventing the Siberian,“ he seemed to like that. He had originally started with Siberians and come in dead last in several races, and I think for someone with Harris’s ego, that was a hard experience that left him with a kind of love/hate relation to the breed. I used to tease him just a little by saying, „I think you just started with the wrong Siberians.“ That was Harris as I knew him, however briefly. As to my theories of what constitutes a breed, I am much more artist than scientist and accept the AKC definition of purebred. I certainly understand the perspective of people like Harris, who seek ways to inject hybrid vigor into a gene pool, but it’s simply not the game I play. It IS, however, the game they play with the Alaskan gene pool, and I very much applaud it there. Michael Jennings
Posted on: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 12:20:26 +0000
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