History of the Icelandic Sheepdog -ISIC Information

http://www.icelanddog.org/index.html

ISIC is an abbreviation for the Icelandic Sheepdog International Committee.

Member nations are: Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

ISIC's main purpose is to help and encourage cross-border cooperation in all matters that will benefit and preserve the Icelandic Sheepdog.


Short history

In 1994 the Icelandic Kennel Club, HRFÍ, and the Icelandic breed-club, DÍF, after many years of work, succeeded in convincing the Icelandic Parliament, the Allthingi, that it was a national responsibility to preserve the Icelandic Sheepdog as an inheritance of Icelandic culture.
Allthingi decided to give the Minister of Agriculture the mission to form a committee in Iceland with the purpose to overlook the future of the Icelandic Sheepdog as a national breed to preserve.

The HRFÍ chairman of that time, Gudrun R. Gudjohnsen, became one of the committee-members. When the majority of the committee thought they were ready for a final proposal, HRFÍ did not agree. According to them, a lot of basic information necessary for the final proposal was missing.

HRFÍ and DÍF looked for support abroad, mainly in Sweden, and with the help of the swedish breedclub, Islandhunden-Sverige, the first international breed-club support was given through a common document to the Nordic Kennel Union in january 1996, signed by breedclubs and representatives from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland and Finland.

This was the real start of official international cooperation between responsible breedclubs/breedrepresentatives and resulted in international seminars in Sweden 1996, Iceland 1997, Holland 1998 and Denmark 1999.

At the seminar in 2007, ISIC elected a board consisting of: Gudrun R. Gudjohnsen (chairman), Hans-Åke Sperne (secretary) and Wilfred Olsen (cashier)

The present day situation
One of the main issues have been to find a common computer programme for the registration of dogs, so that all registered dogs in the member countries can be brought together in a database. This will facilitate the tracking of inherital diseases, as well as making it easier to expand the breeding material and avoid excessive inbreeding.

Much work has been done by Pieter Oliehoek in Holland to get the different databases put together, as well as to analyze the genetic variation in the dog population.