Markovo Kennels

When J. Jeffrey Bragg acquired Ditko of Seppala and leased Duska of Seppala for a litter, he was still a neophyte breeder of mainstream Siberian Huskies. His Canadian Kennel Club kennel name was Tadluk Regd. Already, though, he was starting to realise that Seppala Siberians were something quite out of the ordinary, and that his litter from two J. D. McFaul dogs deserved some special designation. He applied to C.K.C. to register the kennel name "Markovo" after the Anadyr River trading village where the Ramsay imports had been collected.

That was the beginning of Markovo Kennels. The first location of the kennel was on a 100-acre farm at Oxford Station, Ontario, near Kemptville 35 miles south of Ottawa. Markovo was there from 1970 until August 1973, when Bragg moved from Ontario and joined Betsy Bush on a quarter-section (160-acre)farm east of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, on Highway 5 near Clavet. The kennel was located there for about a year, and then moved to another quarter-section farm south of the city near Pike Lake Provincial Park.

Markovo Kennels bred and registered a total of ten litters of Seppala Siberians during the period between September 1970 and February 1975. The stock thus produced (along with those of Seppineau Kennels, to a lesser extent) proved crucial to the survival of Seppalas into the 21st century. A small amount of other Seppala breeding occurred, but none of it wound up contributing to the pure Seppala mainstream.

In the summer of 1975 Markovo Kennels was closed and the dogs sold in the Markovo dispersal sale. On the last day of October of that year, Betsy and Jeffrey left Canada for what was to be a 6-month sojourn in Europe. As it happened, they were not to return to the country until 1993.