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Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Foundations podcast. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about a recent trip I took that had something to do with sled dogs and what those North Country runners taught me about all working dogs and how we view them. People often tell me I have a dream job, and in a few ways they’re not wrong. The free hunting gear is sweet, and many of the trips I’ve taken just would have never happened if it were up to me and my bank account. There are other parts, like about ninety three percent of it, that are kind of just a job, and that is what it is. But then there are times when I have to do something that really sucks or makes me question why I ever got into this in the first place. Recently that hit home with me when I woke up in a freezing tent with a shivering black lab in my sleeping bag, And that trip and what I learned about it is sort of the backbone for this whole episode. If you want to not underestimate dogs and truly have a good life with your four legged cohorts, this show might help. So buckle up, it’s time to start. This is you know, probably gonna show my age a little. But do you know how sometimes you’re like, Hey, this thing would be a really good idea, we should do it, and then about three months past and that thing becomes a reality and you’re just like, shit, I don’t want to do that thing. I sort of feel like, in a roundabout way, I just described most of adulthood, but maybe not. I did specifically describe a show that I just filmed, though, so picture this way Back at the beginning of the year, my boss and I had a conversation about what shows i’d filmed for the season. What I like about this part of my job, aside from the fact that I really don’t like filming anything, is that I have a lot of creative license. If I can make a strong enough case for something I want to do, I can usually get it approved. Well. During this meeting with my boss, he said to me, I want you to do a couple more shows with your dog, you know, hunting something that someone might care about in some place. Right, pretty vague, right. I had been kicking around the idea doing something with sled dogs, since I just think the air cool as hell, and the few people I’ve met who are big into mushing are generally the kind of people with whom I can have a very enjoyable conversation. So somehow in my head all four of my functioning brain cells got together in a little huddle and said, why don’t we take a sled dog team into the wilderness in northern Minnesota and then winter camp for grouse with my pup, Sadie. Then we can show how sled dogs work and how bird dogs work, and blah blah blah. Everyone who didn’t have to winter camp literally twenty five miles from the Canadian border thought it was a great idea. Now, as November wound down, it started to become a reality. I felt, you know, a lot of things, but none of them were excitement. Spending a few days in a tent with a cameraman and a pup and dealing with everything being frozen all the time started to bother me so much that I stopped checking the weather forecast. Now up here we get a lot of below zero weather this time of year, and seeing those negative numbers in the ten day and then the hourly forecast sucked a lot. But when we drove to northern Minnesota, a route by the way in which I saw quite a few people in the ditch due to a December storm. I tried to be excited, but it wasn’t until we met up with Sean, who’s the owner of Hauling Dogs, which is based out of Ely, that I started to get excited. He’s a dog guy, and he’s the sort of unassuming badass that I’d love to be when I grew up, but I’ll likely never be as capable as he is now. As you can imagine, the conversation went to dogs, and Sean and his musher Buddy Page talked a lot about what their dogs can do, how they are raised and handled, and honestly, it did a lot for me mentally. Being around real dog people is always nice, I guess. The following morning, when we pulled into Shawn’s yard and saw thirty sled dogs chain to their houses, the first thing that struck me was how quiet it was. I thought it was going to be a peer howling chaos, but what I first heard when I stepped out of my truck was a little bit of wind coming down from the land of maple syrup and hockey, and one raven croaking away as it wheeled overhead. And then tried to land close enough to the dogs to steal a morsel of their breakfast. Sean gave me a quick breakdown of how to steer the dogs since I was going to drive my own sled, and then we loaded up and pointed them into the wilderness. Now, when someone like that gives you directions on how to steer a sled dog team, he doesn’t tell you that the sled dog team is going to do what sled dog teams do and that you’re mostly there to run the brakes on this sled because they’re going where they’re going to go. It didn’t matter to me, though, because it was freaking awesome. If you’ve never stood behind eight sled dogs and pulled on the rope to get the whole thing in motion, you’re missing out. Gliding through ten miles of true wilderness behind a team of dogs that has not only been bred for the task but loves it with every fiber of their being is just really really cool. It was also cool to see how they’d respond to any movement I’d make, and how quickly they’d course correct or all shift their gaits slightly to miss a rock on the trail. It was cool how they all decided that they had been quiet enough at the onset so that when they were ready to run, or when we stopped to film something and they took offence to it, they’re howling and yipping. Was almost deafening. And if you’re wondering how a forty eight pound lab that would lose a fight with a three legged mouse thinks of suddenly being dropped into a world of thirty sled dogs, Sadie was terrified for much of that experience, and I don’t blame her, but the sled dogs weren’t really what I expected, which was a relief. In fact, when we got to our campsite, which was a clear spot on the top of a clear cut with a view of miles of rolling pine forests, Sean told me to give each dog on my team a little love and tell them that they did a very good job. Every one of those dogs leaned in for an ear scratch or a belly rub, and I got quite a few kisses on the face from them. I didn’t expect that. I thought sled dogs would be these hardened beasts of burden that didn’t care about people at all. I was super wrong, and I brought that up several times, until another fellow who showed up to help us get out after our trip was over, said that that was just how Sean raised and handled his dogs. They’re not tools. They were all unique and had their own jobs, and I never saw him walk by a dog that he could pet where he didn’t. The idea I had of mushers and of sled dogs wasn’t wrong, and it wasn’t right. It was just a series of beliefs I’d crafted out of having no real experience with them, and then I just assumed I was right. It didn’t make any sense to me that someone could have that many dogs and love them like we love our dogs, and use them for something that was mostly foreign to me, and I didn’t even understand. And when I asked Joe and Sean about that, they just said, well, yeah, some people just treat their sled dogs that way, and some don’t. You See, the rules I believed to be true weren’t true at all. I just had no bays for questioning them because I had no experience with which to raise those questions or see that I was wrong. I look at it kind of like the idea in the white tail world, where everyone thinks they can age deer accurately by looking at them. This came from the outdoor TV media world, and I think it has done more damage than just about anything. So many people definitively claim that a buck is young because of this body shape or that, and that all mature bucks have very specific traits. But they never check their work though. When you do send in your teeth to get the deer aged through cementum annual lie aging, which counts the rings of growth and their teeth just like the rings of a tree, the deer are often way way older than they think. It never occurs to most of us that while we accept without question that genetics play a role in antler size, those same genetics play a role in body size and shape. I’m six too, and I’ve met full grown men who are both a foot shorter than me and some that were dang near a foot taller any huski. My point is this a lot of what we believe. We believe because we’ve heard it, and when enough people say something, it just sort of cements itself into the way things are. With dogs. This kind of thinking can be dangerous because it might talk us into getting the wrong breed. It might talk us into not training the way we should, and it might just generally work against us dog wise. But mostly where I think the danger lies is that it limits our ideas on what our dogs are capable of, and that means we never really try. It’s also a great way to excuse a way of bad behavior. So think about it this way. Let’s say you opt for some type of dog that has generally thought of to be a high strong breed. I don’t know, English cockers, German short hairs, some type of dog that has the reputation as a burner. If you know this going in, you might make a really good plan to run that dog a lot and get it tons of exercise. But when you do that, you now have a very in shape burner of a dog. That’s great for some people, but some people it’s not so great. And we all know that if you have a high drive dog that has no outlets, it’ll often become a huge pain in the ass. But not everyone who runs English cockers or gsps has that problem. They understand generally what they’re getting into with a dog, and they work with it, so everyone involved has a good life. What they don’t do is go, well, what are you going to do. They’re going to chew up slippers and knock over Gramma when she comes over for Christmas, because that’s the kind of dog they are. We do this with kids a lot, And if you happen to know any teacher and you don’t believe this, ask them what the common denominator is with most of the problem kids they deal with. I’ll bet you a bag of dog food that they’ll say something about the parents and how far their heads are buried in the sand, often while waving away bad behavior through some platitude like, well, boys will be boys, right, But you know when most of the kindergarten boys are playing with blocks and trucks, you’re just crawled into the duck work and the ceiling. It took a dump in there. There’s something going on. When we limit our thinking on this kind of thing with dogs, it can go a lot of different directions. That high drive dog that we write off is whatever, is probably capable of a lot more than we were giving it credit for. We might not even know that just about any dog that will pick up and carry something can probably be trained to shed hunt, and even if they won’t be very good at it, they are capable of it, and that’s good for them and for you. This, in some ways is another sign on how we view our relationship with our dogs, or at least how some folks do. They buy a dog that is this breed which is known for these traits, and then they expect that breed to deliver the behaviors it’s generally known for. But that largely discounts our influence in the whole thing, which we have a hell of a lot of agency over. I’m sure Sean could have mindless robot sled dogs that win races and happily pull clueless grout hunters into the wilderness without complaining, But there would be something missing there, and honestly, they probably wouldn’t work for him in a way that they should. They would get the job done, but there would be an intangible missing that would take the whole experience down a notch, even if it was nearly imperceptible to a lot of people. But his style is to treat them like they are a team, and that allows him to ask a lot of them, which they are happy to deliver. That might be the best thing about trying to forget a lot about what we think we know of our dogs and truly trying to learn what they are and what they need and what makes them tick. That’s something that I’ve run into with a hell of a lot of good trainers. Now what I mean by that aren’t just folks who can get dogs to do what they want them to do. You can force a dog to behave and plenty of trainers do that, or at least a lot of them used to, but I doubt it’s gone away completely. Forced compliances a thing. But if it’s the primary training method, that relationship is going to suffer, and that dog will not deliver those behaviors to anyone else without that same force, which a lot of people aren’t willing to do. It’s the whole catch and more flies with honeything. And when we believe that our dogs are capable of a lot, and then we work to see how much that really is, it only strengthens the relationship and I think produces dogs that are more likely to be independent problem solvers who know when to ask for our help. When I see a trainer who is curious about what dogs can really achieve, I generally see someone who has a very loyal following. It doesn’t have to work too hard to keep the clients coming back. They’ve learned that dogs are individuals, and there are breed characteristics that are usually pretty reliable, but that the variance in each dog is enough to work with to do better than what’s generally expected, at least in cases where there’s some decent blood to work with. Anyway, this is one of the reasons I think it’s such a good idea to expose ourselves to the greater world of good dogs and good dog trainers. It’s kind of the opposite of how we are pressured to live these days, where we develop up some world views and then select carefully curated content to further cement those views instead of questioning them and trying to understand why someone else might think differently. When you make up your mind about something dog wise and allow that to stick, it can hold you back in ways that you can’t imagine if you’re never exposed to people and other dogs that don’t adhere to those beliefs. I realize that not everyone can hire a sled dog musher to help them understand dogs in general better, nor would you want to if you don’t want to freeze your knackers off. But there’s nothing that says you need to go to those extremes. Think about what you could do in your life to expand your relationship with your dog. Can you take them to Cabela’s or some other pet friendly store for a short shopping trip. If not, then you have a pretty good idea some behavior issues you probably need to work on something that would be good to do this winter, or I don’t know, can your upland dog be trained to hunt ducks? Have you ever watched someone train a therapy dog or a service dog. There are a lot of ways to go about this stuff, but the key is to stay curious and absorb information from a lot of different sources. It has become super popular in the dog training world to adopt some trainer’s method and then follow that forever. There’s a lot of good in a lot of those programs generally, but the idea that someone who trains gsps has all the answers for you and your specific GSP and that you shouldn’t look outside for answers or ideas is just flawed. It’s a great start, a great path to follow, but can become limited in your thinking in a hurry if you’re not careful. There is also the truth that the more you do with your dog, whatever that might be, the more they’ll show you not only what they need, but also what you can do to make the relationship better. Maybe you have a great dog, but it’s a wire hair some other dog that really likes to run, and you can’t have them off leash because well, they’re going to run. Yet someone somewhere has a very similar dog that can be trusted off leash no matter how many squirrels are out or how many people they see in the park. The best way to sign off on this is to think about what your dog can do and what you can do with your dog, versus focusing on what your dog isn’t very good at or what you don’t want to do with your dog because of some expected behavior due to the breed. Reframe your thinking, expose yourself to the greater world of good dogs. See where it takes you. Do that, and then come back in two weeks because I’m gonna start talking about researching litters of puppies and some of the big mistakes a lot of folks make. That’s it for this show. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been The Houndation’s podcast as always. I want to thank you so much for all your support. I have never, ever, ever, ever worked out a place in the outdoors industry where we’ve had such a great audience. It’s truly special, so thank you for that. If you want some more hunting content because you want to learn something, maybe you want to get a recipe to cook something up here, or maybe you’re just bored out of your mind because there’s like fifteen hours of darkness this time of year, go to the mediater dot com. We drop new content every single day. I’m talking can articles, recipes, podcasts, films, whatever, it’s all there at the mediator dot com. Go check it out.
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