603 — Purebred or Mixed Breed: Silken Windhounds Bridge the Divide

Purebred or Mixed Breed: Silken Windhounds Bridge the Divide
[caption id="attachment_12486" align="alignleft" width="358"] Silken Windhounds descend from lurchers (believed to be Whippet x Sheltie) and Borzoi.[/caption]

Ashlynn Hill joins host Laura Reeves for a discussion of the Silken Windhound. These dogs appear to bridge the divide between preservation purebred dog breeders and the "fad" mixed breeds that make many preservation breeders tear out their hair.

A partial transcript of the conversation follows.

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- Welcome to Pure Dog Talk. I am your host, Laura Reeves, and we're having these conversations. We had a conversation last week about the American bullies and kind of this concept that so few of the breeds that we know today were, as I say, burst from the head of Zeus, right? Most of our dogs that we know were created somewhere along the way. Some of them are more recent and there's a conversation to be had about these created crosses, why they were created, what the goals are, what the history and the purpose of the crosses are, and how that progress is going into creating a whole new purebred dog.

So I have with me Ashlyn Hill, who is involved in Silken Windhounds. She says she came through the herding breeds to Silken Windhound pipeline, which I think is adorable.

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And so welcome Ashlyn. I'm really excited to have this conversation. We've reached episode 600 and we're kicking into the new era with all these spicy conversations. So I'm really excited about doing that. I think there is an interesting and worthwhile conversation to be had.


Thank you so much for having me, Laura. And congratulations on your 600 episodes. I'm very thrilled to be here. This is pretty exciting.



So talk to us about silken windhounds specifically. What is the history of this particular cross? What was the purpose? You know, why was this developed?



[caption id="attachment_12485" align="alignright" width="495"] Kristull Amalie - LHW (1984) from Francie Stoll's A litter.[/caption]

Yeah. So Silken Windhounds, we're going back to the very beginning. We're looking at around the 1980s.
Our breed founder is Francie Stoll. She had a pretty extensive history in Borsoy before she decided to take on this project of making a new breed. So in the early 1980s, she actually got...