Christmas has come early - and it’s a white one!

We have been dancing round here like kids before Christmas for weeks now, eagerly awaiting the arrival of diggers, and cement mixers, men in yellow jackets, and lots of commotion as we start to build our long awaited American Barn and new yard! The excitement has been building and now we have woken up on our “Christmas Morning” to find it’s a white one!

It has snowed all night long, and is still snowing now at almost mid day so the first fall of winter has not melted away, but is now covering the flat packed barn that has sat in the car park for 3 whole years!

Now, I very much doubt that a little snow is going to make any difference to an 18 tonne track machine, but it is impeding its progress and excitement is giving away to frustration - frustration that it has not arrived yet, and frustration that the constant snow showers are going to make it difficult to view the work of the contractors across the field from the old yard!

Of course the equine members of staff are completely oblivious to our intentions, and whilst they stand miserably in mud and the snow sits on their rugs they have no idea that we are planning to make them a cosy new dwelling complete with winter feeding corral so that they need never feel a drop of rain or flake of snow again. This is our foal, Lottie’s, first ever snow. She seems a little interested but is safely tucked up in our current barn to prevent her charging around and hurting herself and is mainly ignoring it in favour of her haylage.

However, there is one type of Wildride creature that can’t ignore the snow, and that is of course, the huskies. They are so excited by the snow that they are making the barn worshippers look unmoved! Currently Nuke and Kramer are out in the pen charging around, wrestling, rolling, and cavorting in it. The fact that Nuke has a completely nude belly after recently being spayed seems to mean nothing to her. However, we shall take her inside and warm her up with cuddles on the sofa afterwards!

The sled dogs have started their training a little late this year as we have had such a busy October holiday, and September was very warm and humid making it difficult to get them out in case they overheated which is more likely at the start of training as they are fairly unfit. Our volunteer kennel maid, Trini, has been starting them off with their Gee/Haw training (teaching them their left [Haw] from their right [Gee]) which is the first stage in our fittening and training program. She is hoping to race a team in junior events for us this year so she has been doing the training mainly unaided to ensure the dogs will take direction from her, and has done extremely well as they seem to really have got the idea pretty quickly. Most of them are just in need of a refresher, but some of our young dogs are learning for the first time.

Initially this is done on the lead and we take them into the riding school and walk them round a prepared obstacle course consisting of shapes and junctions that can be reversed to enable us to use both commands. The course is different each time we use it so that they never become conditioned to a route and have to really use their brains to decipher what the commands mean.

Eventually we move onto doing this out on a trail doing “Canicross” which is basically a jog with a dog. For this we put the dogs in harness and onto very long lines that are attached to abseiling harnesses worn by the handlers. The handlers jog (fairly effortlessly) behind the dogs who pull them. This is a great way to get mushers and dogs fit enough to pull a rig or sled before we them move onto the next stage which is teaming them up, and finally getting them fast by running them from the front of our dune buggy. We use abseiling harnesses rather than specially designed waist belts as a couple of our dogs are incredibly strong and we need to be able to really sit into the harnesses with all our weight if we need to stop them. There is no way we could hold onto them on a plain lead, and we have had problems with shoulder injuries in handlers who have tried to do this in the past. Canicross is quick with it being possible to do 3 minute miles, and jogging without a sled dog will always seem boring after you try it !

Are you interested in more information about training sled dogs? Then register on here and post a question or leave a comment.

WE ARE NOW TAKING BOOKINGS FOR NEXT YEARS SLED DOG TRAINING TRIPS.

This entry was posted on 28/10/2008 at 01:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.