ContinentalKennelClub


Continental Kennel Club (often abbreviated "ConKC")

 

The so-called Continental Kennel Club is a commercial dog registry founded in 1991 and located in Walker, Louisiana. It claims to "register" any of approximately 450 dog breeds, including a couple of extinct breeds such as the Hawaiian Poi Dog and the Tahltan Bear Dog. Inasmuch as many of the listed breeds are obscure and unpopular regional European and Asian breeds, it must be presumed that a large number of ConKC's registries are empty files in which no dogs have yet been registered. The company, a registered for-profit corporation, has a history of legal problems with the Canadian Kennel Club over its use of the CKC acronym and has been widely condemned for its association with puppy mills.

In 2002 Douglas W. Willett of Seeley Lake, MT, negotiated an arrangement with ConKC whereby the company would charter a "breed club" called the International Seppala Siberian Sleddog Club and would undertake to register Seppala Siberian Sleddogs under eligibility rules established by Mr. Willett. Neither the newly-chartered club nor ConKC itself had any connection at the time with the Working Canine Association of Canada or the Seppala Siberian Sleddog Project, nor were the eligibility rules compatible with those established in 1997 for the authentic SSSD breed. By August 2002 when Mr. Willett held his first Seppala Symposium at his Montana home, ConKC had "registered" over 200 spurious "Seppalas" and was producing teeshirts, sweatshirts and coffee mugs using photographs ripped from the SSSD Project's website.

Efforts undertaken in 2003 to regularise the situation and to bring about a harmonisation of the ConKC registry with WCAC guidelines failed due to refusal on the part of Mr. Willett and his co-directors to negotiate or to entertain any change or compromise whatever. As a result, the ConKC/ISSSC registry remains unrecognised by the Working Canine Association of Canada and dogs from that registry are not elegible for legitimate SSSD breed status either in Canada or the U.S.A.

 

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