still no snow

Yesterday (Sun.) trained two teams of eight. Our new 6x6 is a fantastic tool for me. I was not able to ride the four wheeler any more. With this unit you sit side by side while you drive. It has seat belts and a steering wheel to hang onto. I have the ability to ride for short rides in this with out too much punishment to my body.
It makes it easy to talk to Rachel while the dogs are pulling the Ranger (6x6) . I might have gone over this before but I will say it again. This is control. There are two things we do when we are out running dogs. We are conditioning and Training . The training is to teach dogs the proper behavior when they are working. It is pretty simple to teach them but you must have control to stop and go talk to the dog. The simple action of stopping makes it almost embarrassing for the dog that needs a talking to. I have seen in some cases that other dogs will actually get snappy towards the dog that is causing us to stop all the time because of the bad behavior.
When we get out on the sleds later there is always very little snow to start with. It makes it hard for Rachel to stop. She is scared of losing the team which is the worst thing you can do but it does happen. If you are worried about stopping then if a dog is slacking and biting at the dog beside it how can you stop and go up the line and fix a tangle or let a dog know you are not happy. This doesn't mean beating a dog it just means making an example of that dog. Then when you take off again you just say that dogs name as you leave. Like Gee-whiz get up. When the Ranger starts to move forward and that dog naturally starts to pull hard because it has had a good rest then you reward the proper behavior by saying good dog or you can stop and go up the line of dogs and pat the dog and make a big deal out of how good she has done. they learn quick this way. If you have a good relationship with your dogs. look after them well, with bedding, food and love, then these dogs want to please you. It is hard for them to please you if they don't understand what you want so by stopping and either showing your disappointment or pleasure with the dog makes it easy for them to know the difference. With control you soon have a team of dogs that work hard and have consistent behavior in the team.]
The opposite can happen when you cannot stop. If a dog is not pulling hard and decides that it would be fun to bother the dog beside it and you cannot stop this behavior with your voice command then this will continue until U can stop and move up the line and tell the dog no. You are probably untangling the dogs as well. In a sprint race this is absolutely unacceptable. You cannot have one dog fool around this way. If you continue to run the dogs like this with them fooling around they soon think this is what you want them to do? So it is important to stop and let them know you are not happy with them climbing all over the dog beside it and biting at it. Playful or not this cannot be allowed to happen in a team of sprint dogs.
Our runs have proven there are some dogs that enjoy this type of behavior and have learnt that this is a fun thing to do and they do not have to work while in the team. Slowly we have corrected them and now they are working well again in the team.
We have two young dog teams but most of the main training has been done so for the most part they know what to do. We discovered a really good Leader yesterday. He showed signs of it last year. This year he really wants to be in front of the dog team. If you place him in the team right behind the leaders He will grab the line pull the leaders backward and let them go forward and hit the the end of the line. This is a sign of a leader to me. So we put him in lead and he ran awesome, like he was suppose to be there. His name is Rafiki. Now he is a really good leader and that is what we are looking for. We are going to need good leaders that can be in lead to train others beside them. The leaders that are going to train others need to be very strong physically and mentally. We sold allot of our leaders to other young mushers so they could have a good start to building a successful team. This has left us shorter than we calculated. Oh well we will train some new leaders to get by this season.
I hope that this has not been a repeat post in terms of content I felt that it would be worth explaining how some of it works to people that do not know. Since this type of training is relevant to our daily life it also becomes relevant to our blog.

Thanks for visiting talk to you soon.