What exactly makes a breed a breed? That can be discussed from many different aspects. Recognition by clubs and what clubs? Studbooks, closed studbooks, breed standard, breed club, group of breeders working for the same goal, uniform looks, are they genetically defined apart from others etc?

This particular post is not about all that canine-technical stuff, it is about the perception of a breed, when did people outside the very small breed community even start to think of Silken Windhounds as a breed?

Arpanet was born in 1969. The official birth date of the internet was not until 1983 when the new communication protocol TCP/IP came about. Limited private access to this network came 89-90.

By our way of counting, the Silken Windhound was already born by then, the first litter, the first step toward becoming what is today the Silken Windhound, was born in March 1985. The name Silken Windhound was not invented back then.

So who knew about their existence? Practically nobody.
People did not have computers. No internet. No social media. No Google.
Silkens were at best at the proto-Silken stage.

The ruckus about the Longhaired Whippet was known in sighthound circles, mainly through sighthound magazines, breed club newsletters and the gossip between people in private and at the shows.

Nobody really knew anything; they had heard rumours. And they had opinions. Lot’s of those 😉

Outside the sighthound world and also, outside the US, not many had heard of the LHW and had no idea such a thing existed. A Whippet with a long coat? Something people could not imagine as nobody had put the idea in front of them.

Move along to the mid 90s. The tech nerds now had computers. Mobile phones were not yet invented, maybe with the exception of those big heavy things that hardly can be called “mobile”.

Some forward thinking companies introduced email, if nothing else, a lot of people had access to email at work.

There was an internet of sorts out there. But nothing like what we are used to today.
Web pages were written in HTML code. Most of them painstakingly written by hand.
The database driven sites were few, there were no social media, still no Google. Internet itself was a rather small place back then.

How did people find things on internet?
The first search engines had popped up. Altavista, Dogpile and lot’s of others.
None of them covered most of internet.

Forums were the way like-minded people found each other and could discuss and get tips about sites.

And email based forums, such as E-groups that later turned into Yahoo Groups. Our Windhound list was created in 1998 at E-groups, just after we changed the breed name to Silken Windhound.

To a large extent a person who was looking for dog pages, found one site, went to their page called “Links” and followed the links the owner of this site had been kind enough to put up there.

We were like human search engine bots, we crawled the net link by link. From other sites. If nobody at all had a link to your site, you were not found.

And then there was the big catalogue. The Yahoo Directory was launched in 1994.
It was literally a directory, with lot’s and lot’s of categories.

You found your way to the type of categories you were interested in and drilled down into the sub categories down and down and …
Until you found dog breeds.

If you had a site you could suggest your site to the Yahoo directory. If you were lucky they would add you and now a lot more people would actually find you!

There was just one problem. There was no breed called Silken Windhound, no Silken Windsprite and no Longhaired Whippet. They did not exist as far as the big and almighty directory was concerned.

During this time people rarely used words like designer breeds, nor doodles. It was not a widely known concept yet. Nobody mentioned Silkens as a designer breed. Silkens were just mutts. Plain and simple.

Silkens had a lot more enemies than friends in those days and the enemies seldom had first hand experience of the dogs, owners or breeders. They believed the gossip on the town and it was not in our favor.

Silkens were most certainly not a breed! What a notion, to call them a breed!

For years I banged my head against Yahoo directories, trying to get them to add Silkens (Silken Windsprites at that time actually, we still did not have our present name) to their directory of breeds. Nothing happened. According to Yahoo Silkens were not a breed.

Then one day, it happened! We were already named Silken Windhounds by then and one day, lo and behold, Silken Windhounds were listed as a breed by the Yahoo directory!

This meant a lot more people all over the world heard or rather read, about Silkens. Not that it meant more friends necessarily, but the word was out there, we existed!

It was easy to notice that discussions about Silkens increased in many places at that point in time, world wide. We went from unknown to being discussed at least. That was one of the first major steps. Silkens were discussed in terms of being a breed, although you might be for or against that idea.

As I write this, it is February 2023 and there are still people that deny that Silken Windhounds are a breed, to them we are now “doodles” or a designer breed at best. But not the real thing.

In Europe the big change in attitude towards Silkens came in 2004 when the Slovenian Kennel Club, as the first kennel club in the world, recognized Silken Windhounds.

Slovenia is a small country, a small kennel club, it is also a young kennel club (they are normally 100+ years old) because Slovenia is a young country, created in 1991 out of the ruins of former Yugoslavia. But still, it is a kennel club that is a member of FCI. That counts for something in Europe.

To some, the recognition by Slovenia meant Silkens are a breed, to others it does not because the breed is still not recognized by FCI itself.

In USA, country of origin, the breed was recognized by UKC in 2011. A huge change that opened many doors in USA, in Europe, not so much…

In Europe it took until June 2022 until another country recognized Silken Windhounds, this time it is Switzerland, another member of FCI. Hungary followed suit in late 2022.

The breed has reached a tipping point in people’s minds and I fully expect more European countries, with kennel clubs associated with FCI to fall like domino bricks in the coming years, with or without the recognition of AKC.

But not all of them, many countries will keep the most basic requirement for recognition of a new breed, the breed has to be recognized in country of origin by a kennel club acceptable to FCI. And that is AKC for USA.

If and when AKC recognizes Silkens, Europe and all of the FCI kennel clubs also outside Europe will be open to Silkens. With one caveat, it takes a population in the country and an owner or a national breed club to file for recognition before a kennel club does recognize that breed.

The final factor to convince people a breed is a breed will always be when the breed is recognized in the country they themselves live in. All of them may not like it, but they have to accept it.

Lot’s of people like the idea of Silken Windhounds and would want one, but absolutely not until they are recognized where they live. For me personally such reasoning would have meant that I lost the opportunity to share my life with Silkens for the past 25 years.

Let me assure you, lack of recognition is not worth losing the opportunity to live with these wonderful dogs! I would gladly have lost all the naysayers, the enemies of Silkens and the people spitting in my face (actually very literally !) just because I have Silkens. But even that has been outweighed by the Silkens themselves.

It has been an interesting personal journey, from seeing Francie´s ad about Nameless (Kristull Incognito) in the American Borzoi magazine Borzoi International in 1992, until today.

A journey that may never have happened, had I not being a subscriber to that magazine, all those years ago.

by the pen