Where Is The Finish Line?
Find out what happens when a man from a small Italian town travels thousands of miles to take part in the Iditarod.
Season Two
Miles From Safety
Succeeding in a race like the Iditarod comes down to preparation. But what happens when you’re faced with a situation you can’t prepare for?
On Pins & Needles
Matthew Failor is an experienced musher, having competed in multiple Iditarod events. Yet even the most experienced competitors can be faced with unique challenges…
Short Notice
Imagine you’re an athlete competing to be at the pinnacle of your sport. Perhaps you’re a swimmer, a sprinter, a pitcher, or a quarterback.
You dedicate yourself to honing your craft. You learn the skills you’ll need to succeed. You spend time mentoring underneath one of the legends of your sport. You work hard – you know that it isn’t your time yet, but it’s just around the corner. Maybe in a year or two.
And then, you get the shock of your life – it turns out that just around the corner isn’t next year. It isn’t the year after. In fact, just around the corner is actually four days away. Four days. You have four days to prepare for the biggest event of your career. You have to mentally and physically prepare yourself to take on a gruelling marathon in less than one hundred hours. How will you handle the challenge?
This might sound like the elaborate plot of a Hollywood movie, but in the 2020 Iditarod, this is exactly the fate that befell Sean Underwood, a twenty-nine year old musher who was born in Atlanta.
Underwood was mentoring under Jeff King, an Iditarod Hall of Famer and four-time winner of the event (1993, 1996, 1998, 2006). When King had to undergo emergency surgery in the week leading up to the 2020 Iditarod, he nominated Underwood to take his place in the race.
What followed was a remarkable story, as this rookie musher entered his first Iditarod with just a few days to prepare. In this episode of A Life of Dogs, we speak to Underwood about his first experience running in the Iditarod.
Underwood’s introduction to mushing
Born in Atlanta, GA, Underwood moved to Alaska in 2015 after graduating college. He spent time living with his aunt, uncle and cousin, working with them to fish commercially for sockeye salmon on Kodiak Island. His aunt and uncle were friends with Jeff King – a legend in the mushing world. Underwood started working at King’s Husky Homestead, where tours are offered and visitors can witness sled dog training in action.
After spending time working at Husky Homestead doing a variety of tasks, Underwood gained experience and learned how to control the sled and the team of dogs. Then, when King suffered a back injury just a week before a 200 mile sled dog race, he asked Underwood to step in. That wouldn’t be the last time Underwood would take King’s place in a sled dog race at short notice.
The 2020 Iditarod
After King’s unexpected surgery just a week before the Iditarod, Underwood discusses how he found out he would be competing and prepared for the race with just a few days’ notice. He explains the emotions he experienced in that period – from those few days before the Iditarod, to how he felt during the ceremonial start in Anchorage.
Being a rookie in a race like the Iditarod is daunting enough, let alone with just a few days to prepare. It is a sled dog race unlike any other, both in terms of distance and duration. Underwood talks about the conditions he encountered on the trail – and how it was actually a pleasant surprise compared to what he expected.
In addition to the physical exertions of the race, the Iditarod is also a race of strategy. As a musher, you have to strategically manage the pace of your dogs, plus decide in advance which items to send to specific checkpoints. Underwood describes how King’s experience of the Iditarod (remember, as King was intending to run the race himself, he had been the one to decide which resources were going to be needed and when) helped him during the race.
Underwood’s incredible rookie story doesn’t end in this episode. As Underwood and his dog team reached the coast and approached the finish line, there was one final twist awaiting him in the Last Great Race On Earth. We’ll bring you the conclusion of this thrilling story in one of our upcoming episodes.
Be sure to check out Underwood’s website at mushsean.com, or follow him on Instagram @keepcalmmushsean.
A special thanks to Sean Underwood for participating in this interview. All photos on this page are credit to Sean Underwood and used with permission.
We would like to thank our episode sponsors. Be sure to visit them to learn more and show them your support. Without their continued support our podcast wouldn’t be possible.
Royal Canin
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Highland Canine Training, LLC
Podcast Transcript
Click ‘Show transcript’ below to read the transcript from this episode of A Life of Dogs.
A Life of Dogs Podcast – Season Two, Episode Six (S2, E6)
Episode Name: Short Notice
Host
Jason Purgason
Guest
Sean Underwood
Duration
1:03:08
Broadcast Date
October 26, 2021
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Sean: What I was kind of the verbal agreement between Jeff and I was that he would pencil me around the 2021 Iditarod. And so I got back from that race and I was like, alright, I can kind of just close through the rest of the winter. You know, I’ll just help Jeff get ready for the Iditarod and then when he leaves, it’s fun to work with the puppies and explore our little area here in Denali.
Jason: It was Sunday March 8th. A seasoned team of sled dogs danced in anticipation. The crisp snow crunching under their paws as they await the signal to begin. It’s the 48th annual Iditarod, and they know that just around the corner, an epic journey awaits. Standing on the sled directly behind them is Shawn Underwood, a first time Iditarod musher as he awaits nervously for the last great race to begin. Just four days ago, this young man from Atlanta, Georgia, learned that he’d be running this pack of dogs over 1000 miles across the frigid Alaskan wilderness. But sometimes, you don’t choose your fate, fate chooses you. From A Life of Dogs, I’m Jason Ferguson and this is Short Notice.
Narrator: Support for A Life of Dogs is brought to you by Royal Canin. Royal Canin offers precise, effective nutrition for dogs based on size, age, breed and to address specific needs. To learn more about Royal Canin visit them on the web at royalcanin.com and by Highland Canine Training the industry leader in professional dog training solutions and premier canine education. Highland Canine Training offers turnkey solutions for everyone, from pet owners to law enforcement and military organizations. Learn more at highlandcanine.com.
Sean: My uncle on my dad’s side live up here and they’ve been here for 40 years. And most of that time have been commercial fishing up here. And I, at that point in my life in 2015, I recently graduated college and had some wanderlust and wanted to see some new places. And I like seeing places where I might have some kind of connection. And they can show me maybe the more authentic version of the place that they live. And so I thought about Alaska, and my aunt and uncle who I was really not close with, because, you know, you’re just so far away and such different lifestyles. So I called them up and asked about their life and what they’re doing. And my dad had suggested that they probably, he didn’t know much, but he said they might need some help fishing. You know they’re getting up there in age and even though you’re not experienced, it would be might be helpful for you to learn something from them this summer. And so I called them and they got me a job. And I spent the next two summers up on Kodiak Island, set net fishing for Sockeye Salmon commercially, with my aunt and uncle and cousin. And it was like the most eye opening experience for me. I mean, it was the most wild adventure. And for them, it was just like a pretty slow summer. But for me, it was like living off the grid. You’re drinking water out of a creek catching your own food and no cell service, no roads, the only way to get to this cabin was on a float plane. And that closest village was across the bay and there was one person in that high school in the village. It was 50 people living there, it just was the craziest, most amazing summer and it kind of began my love story with Alaska. And they happen to know Jeff King, he is the guy I’ve been working for it for last few years. Because their daughters worked here with Jeff’s tourism business. And the more time I spent up in Alaska, the more questions I asked about winter because I knew that summer, it was pretty challenging living here in the summer on Kodiak specifically. And I liked the challenge of the winter even though I’ve never even experienced more than an inch of snow for the six hours that it stays on the ground in Atlanta once every five years. So I started asking about winter and they brought up their friend Jeff and how he ran the Iditarod and won the Iditarod and they have a couple of his dogs and so I got in touch with him and he hired me to kind of help around the property and I got paid a minimum wage. And then once training the dogs started it was kind of downgraded to give me a place to live and a little bit of cash for groceries and that’s kind of the standard for your barrier to entry into the mushing world is you just got to be okay with not really getting much money, but they let you in by giving you a place to stay and showing you the ropes. And it kind of just snowballed from there. Just finding yourself at the right place at the right time.
Jason: This is Sean Underwood, one of last year’s rookie Iditarod mushers. In this episode, we will learn about his unique story. Unlike many Iditarod mushers Sean did not spend years preparing to run this race.
So when did you start with Jeff?
Sean: 2016 August, and I ran my first race about six months later. And that would be a pretty quick trajectory for most people in the mushing world. Some people will just pay big money and run their first race in the same amount of time. But I was really just planning on being there to help out. Scooping the dog poop and harnessing the dogs and taking them on some easier runs where there would be as little complications as possible. And then I started showing, I guess, a little bit of competence in the guy — me and my co-worker were working for Jeff, he tweaked his back, he was going to run a race but couldn’t go and then I just took his place. And I ran a 200 mile sled dog race. And it was kind of a similar fashion to how I ran the Iditarod. I found out I was going to run the race, like one week before I ran it. And Jeff gave me his best team and just said, don’t get caught up in the race, just pretend like it’s a training run. You know how to run the dogs, you know how to feed the dogs, don’t run them too fast and you’ll be fine. And that’s what we did. And they did awesome. And it was a really hilly race and I got to get my first Iditarod qualifier. I didn’t even really think about the Iditarod, I was just thinking, well, this is going to be cool race. And then I got to the races office and they said, hey, this is an Iditarod qualifier. Do you want us to write your name down and send this information to the Iditarod? And I was like, I mean, I don’t really think I’m planning on running it. And they’re like, well, if there’s even like a .01% chance that you would think you would run it, you should just do it anyways. And I did. And then ever since then I kind of had that seed planted in the back of my mind, like how can I get to run this 1000 mile race that I probably have no idea what I’ll be getting into.
Jason: The Iditarod isn’t an event for the faint of heart. And in order to qualify, it is necessary to demonstrate that a musher and their team has run enough races throughout the year where it will be safe for them to partake. So you obviously had to have a few more qualifiers. You got to get what 750 total, I think it is or something like that. So how did you end up with those races? And how did they come about?
Sean: Well, the first winter, like I said, I got the Tustumena 200 which I don’t even know if that race is happening anymore. I got to see the Iditarod start and watch Jeff be that big time celebrity that he is in Anchorage. And then the summertime we do tourism, tell stories about the winter, show off the puppies. Next winter I came back. And this time, part of the contract for me being around was that he would pay for me to run the race in exchange for me training the dogs. And I signed up for this time with a little bit more planning. I signed up for the Copper Basin 300 and it’s known as the toughest 300 miles in Alaska. I really wish I would have read that part of the website. Man it was really — it started my birthday weekend January 14. That’s like three weeks after the winter solstice. It’s the dead of winter, it’s dark. And this race was kind of similar to the weather of the Iditarod in a lot of ways, which kind of helped me prepare for it a little bit better. But it was like really warm 20-30 degrees most of the race and snowing the whole entire time, every single yard. And it was just so slow. And it felt eternal; it was just made the 200 mile race look like a little blip. It was a really challenging terrain, super hilly, really long, long runs. Most of them were over 65 miles long. Usually I wanted to be somewhere around 50 to 55 and then take your rest and do it again. Anyways, half the teams in the race scratched because of the [inaudible 10:51] conditions and we finished like 20 something out of 50 teams that started and it was just a really fun experience where I really felt like, that’s the first time I understood how incredibly talented the dogs are. When you think that they’re probably getting a little bit tired — when that thought first gets into my mind, they’re not even close to getting tired. They’re just getting a little bored more than anything. And then it’s your job to take care of that for them and take care of them. And they did an incredible job. And it was young, there were young dogs, they’re like all 2; and the first time I went they were all the veterans. So that was another element where it made it a little bit more challenging when you have a bunch of dogs that have never raced before. Anyways, that was my second winter. And then this year was my third winter in Alaska. I took a one year between those two winters. And I worked with another musher down in Central Oregon, who also ran the Iditarod but I didn’t get to race that winter. And I came back here and I got to do my final qualifier in February. And the Copper Basin I knew was a really hard race. There’s a few 300 races around here and I wanted to take the most challenging one just to be a little bit more prepared for whenever I do get to run the Iditarod. And to me it was the quest 300 that always sounded challenging. The Quest 1000 is often referred to as the other 1000 mile race. And it’s not as popular. This path has many mushers in it. But it’s a tough race, it’s got half as many checkpoints in the same distance. And it’s a month earlier in the winter. So probability wise, it’s going to be colder, and it’s definitely going to be darker. And the 300 is just the first 300 miles of the 1000 essentially. So that race happened in February. There wasn’t too many entrants in it, we finished I think, like, seventh or something I thought of like 20. And that race was my first experience in a race dealing with the extreme cold, it was an -40 at the coldest, and maybe we get up to zero in the heat of the day, and everything in between. But the dogs did so much better with that cold than they did with the 30 degrees in those previous races. And our speed was the fastest I’ve ever travelled with that distance. And they just did an awesome job. And I just felt like I really, at that point, walked away from that race feeling like I kind of know what I’m doing when it comes to the 300-mile races. I don’t know how to win them, but I know how to get to the finish line efficiently and that kind of made me feel like alright, next year I’ll be ready for the Iditarod and that was kind of the verbal agreement between Jeff and I was that he would pencil me and around 2021.
Jason: Sean had been planning to remain at the kennel while Jeff mushed in the race. A turn of events right before the race however, rapidly changed everything.
Sean: He got a life-threatening illness with his intestines and so he had to go to the hospital to get an emergency surgery. Typically you’re not allowed to let somebody replace you in the Iditarod with that little notice, but if it’s a health scare or unexpected circumstances, they kind of make a judgment call on it. And he had a list of two or three people, I was one of them that he wanted to take his place. And the reason he picked me is because I’ve just been working with the dogs, I knew them all already. And I knew most of the dogs since they were less than a year old, the other two candidates didn’t but they had ran the Iditarod before. So, it was kind of an interesting decision and he was confident he made the right one and I still think he did. So does he. And four days before the race started, he called me from the hospital bed and said, hey, man, I had a really rough night and I’m not going to be able to run the Iditarod anymore and I want you to take my place. And I was like, just right now I’m getting the chills thinking about that moment. I was in disbelief. I thought maybe he was maybe still under the feeling the effects of anesthesia. And maybe it was — should I really take this with a grain of salt maybe. And I heard from the race committee that night, that it was official. I spent the whole day kind of questioning it. And then I got a call from the head Iditarod guy. He confirmed it and then I started frantically getting all my things together. But it really was just me being a little bit stressed out. It really was just simple as grabbing my parka, my mitts, my boots and I’m pretty much ready to go. Because Jeff had already packed up all of the gear that’s sent out to all the checkpoints. I mean, I helped him with that but that Job was already done. All we needed was a body on the sled that knew what they were doing and I just needed to get my human gear that I needed in the sled and ready, which was really only a few hours. And then I got down to Anchorage. Now you got microphones in your face and cameras in your face and it was a little bit new to me. But I’ve always been kind of someone that likes to talk. This has already been a pretty one-way conversation but the race start was incredible. And it was a really emotional weekend for me. Especially before, you know they have the two starts the ceremonial and the official restart as they call it. And the morning of the restart, we were driving from Anchorage to Willow and I was just crying like overwhelmed. And I don’t know, I knew I could do it, I just was like, holy, holy crap, I’m about to run the Iditarod. There’s nothing in between — that’s it, we’re doing it in a couple of hours. And off we went and once you left that start line it was just the most relief I could have felt, because those four days were just really overwhelming. And then you get out on the trail and a calm and quiet kind of takes over. And it’s just you and your dog team and things get a little simpler.
Jason: So it seems like you’re you didn’t really even have time to sort of process this whole thing until — so when did it really set in I’m running the Iditarod.
Sean: It was the morning of the restart. I mean it set in a little bit like those four days but I just don’t think it did 100% set in. I was like okay, alright, running the Iditarod. And you know I said the words and I guess I accepted it to a degree but it was that morning drive on Sunday that I was just overwhelmed with emotion and I couldn’t believe it was happening and I don’t know, it just really hit me hard and was a very exciting morning. I got there to this parking lot and the Iditarod analysts, just like watching a basketball game on ESPN you got your journalist and you got your former NBA player telling you about what to expect from tonight’s basketball game. Well, same thing for the Iditarod. They got a couple of guys that are kind of talking about what’s going on in the race and he came up to me immediately and he had run the race before and he saw just like tears rolling down my face. And he was like, this is the part of the Iditarod that no one really knows about it because you don’t get to see that. You know, and I got it myself did a quick interview and then I started packing and unpacking my sled like five times, just to try to figure out what the best way to do it was. Libby Riddles came up to me, she’s the first woman to win the Iditarod and she was there. She saw my sled and it was just super bulky and I could barely close to zippers. She was like, wow, you’re packing the kitchen sink there. And I was like, I don’t know, I just figured I’d bring more and then I don’t need it I can always just send it home. But yeah, it was a crazy morning and it was dumping. I mean, it was just huge snowflakes and it’s snowed several inches that morning. So yeah, I was very excited.
Jason: After the ceremonies are over, and the excitement of starting wears off it’s just a musher and their dog team. Along with their thoughts, their next job is to run through the Alaskan Arctic more than 1000 miles to the finish line. Although weather during the Iditarod has been milder in recent years, the conditions of the 2020 race proved to be as wild as the events that follow. Stay with us as we continue to tell Sean’s story.
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Sean: Yeah, it was the best winter that race has had in a while. To my understanding there was a lot of concern among the mushers and the race committee, I mean, there are people out there snowmobiling down the trail, making sure it’s safe and also at the same time packing down the snow to make the trail just that much better and quicker. And they said that it’s as wide as the snowmobile, there’s no room on either side, and it’s just four foot plus walls of snow on either side of the trail, and that there wouldn’t be any places to pull over and park your team if you’re planning on camping out; because you can camp out anywhere you want whether it’s on a checkpoint or not. And so people were going to start using their snowshoes to pack down the snow and that used to be kind of a regular thing you did in the early Iditarod days but nowadays no one uses their snowshoes. Really at all, it’s almost completely unheard of. And that was part of the panic attack that I was having was like, what am I going to do a part of my team. There’s going to be nowhere to pull over and what is everybody else doing and I was kind of asking around and it was all, just another reason to get worked up. You get out there and the trail was like, the first 40 miles were pretty soft and bumpy and a lot of snow. And, you know, it was almost kind of I thought it was perfect timing. If you’re going to give me a snowstorm, make it be on day one, because the dogs have rested for three or four or five days with very little exercise, and they’re just screaming to go. And it’s too much power, but the reason that you have that many dogs is because you got to plan on sending some home, so you have to kind of bring the bench with you. Which means early on, when those dogs are pumped up, man, you’re standing on the brake, because it’s just not in their best interest to be going 15 miles an hour down the first 100 miles. You’re going to just blow them up and they’re going to go home before you get halfway through the race. So the snow kind of slowed the team down, it slowed the trail down and I didn’t have to stay on the brake as hard at least. And by the time we get to mile 50, the trail was pretty hard-packed. And I was in the middle of the pack, there’s a bunch of mushers in front of me, they packed down the trail, there’s snow machiners out there, it’s a big party, the Iditarod start and people travel down the trail and set up tailgates or trail gates. And passing your hamburgers and beers, serve sodas or whatever and there’s a lot of traffic. And by the time we got to the sections of trail that we were concerned about, they were as good of a trail as you could possibly ask for. It’s a ton of snow to set your hook in and there was places you definitely could not park your team, for sure, but there was as many places where you could. And it was I mean, I think I got lucky. I’m thinking next time I run this thing the trail is no way going to be as good as it was because we were going through these sections of trail that are the notorious Dalzell Gorge, and the happy river steps that you hear so many crazy stories about people having gnarly crashes. And it was like, it was just fun mushing, there was no real danger that I ever felt in there. I mean, I was like alert level 100 knowing that this is the section this is where you really got to pay attention. But you know, it ended up being just a really, really fun 20 miles, but it wasn’t like I came out of it bruised and battered. And that was because there was a bunch of snow. So yeah, it ended up being really good conditions those first 400 miles — So those first 400 were fantastic and this trail was fast.
Jason: So in that early part, you end up having to go — through the race you go over two different mountain ranges. In the early part, you got to go over the first one. What’s that like for you? What’s it like for the team having to climb up and down to mountain ranges two get to Nome?
Sean: The mountain ranges, I mean, I’m thinking Alaska Range is the mountain range. You know, that is the one that we live in here in Denali, and it’s got some gnarly mountains. You’re thinking, oh, man, this is going to be insane. And then it ended up being maybe not as challenging as the rest of the hills that the race brought you. But it’s early on. And I think that the change in terrain — to me the dogs for me and my team, they just never got tired. I was running a very conservative schedule, being a rookie, even though I had a team that is capable of winning, I didn’t feel comfortable running that kind of schedule. So they were like never — I mean, I remember getting the checkpoints and there’d be a couple of dogs on my team. If you’re running the race competitively, they get to the checkpoint and they go to sleep like instantly because they’re ready to take a nap. I got dogs that come to the checkpoint and they’re playing with each other and wrestling and I’m like, well you should be conserving your energy for something besides wrestling with one another. And one of the competitors looked over at my dog team while they’re resting and was like dude, what are you even doing here? You should be going to the next checkpoint, that team is not tired. Anyways, the point is, what I end up fighting more than the tiredness of the dogs, that’s not really happening at all. What’s happening is when you run on a river for 50 miles, and there’s nothing besides just a river that pretty much stays the same. They are like just moving and they like kind of zone out and they get a little bored, and maybe a little lethargic. But when you’re going through that Alaska Range, they are not lethargic, that’s part of the danger of it is they get so excited that go going through the mountains and up and down the hills, that the more technical the trail gets, it seems, the harder they pull, because they’re excited to go around to turn. I mean, you’ll see their ears perk up whenever they see a bunch of markers that signal that there’s a turn. They’re like, oh, a turn, maybe we can knock coach off the sled. And the Alaska Range was just such a blast. It was like that moment in the race where I felt like, I was actually like an athlete because you really had to steer the sled around. And then you get out of the range, and you got a bunch of river miles ahead of you and you kind of get a break from that technical riding, and then it’s a completely different challenge, which is just totally mental for you and for the dogs. And we got on to the Yukon River and it was just like, there’s this snowstorm that really slowed down. I mean, it was basically the storm that 20 plus teams dropped out of the race, because the storm just made the conditions really, really slow. And people were going like five miles an hour because there’s just a bunch of wet heavy snow. And you’re going on Yukon River man, I swear, I know it’s a river but sometimes it felt like it was uphill. And it’s just a mental, like, it’s a dark place for some reason. I don’t know — that’s why we train the way that we train with our dogs. We take them out on the frozen rivers around here, or to the Denali Highway and the trail is really not that exciting. So the dogs have practiced the monotonous trail, and they know to be ready for it. So they did great. But you know, the hills to me, were the when the dogs performed the best because they get excited, it’s almost like they’re saying, finally a challenge. And then they really, really excel and perform for that challenge. And then when we go on the boring parts of a trail, that’s when they kind of take a break mentally, maybe even a little bit physically and they’re just kind of like running. And you can just tell they’re like checked out. And that’s almost kind of something that you want them to do because they’re getting a little bit of rest while still moving. Just mentally they don’t really need to like be on high alert.
Jason: They say that a journey of 1000 miles begins with one step. Well what is traveling this distance actually, like when you have no human company or entertainment?
Sean: You know, you get to a point where you’re so tired that — I actually like went for a hike last night or two nights ago. And it was like we went on a midnight hike and we got back at 3am and I was just like kind of a shell of myself for the rest of the day, even though I really wasn’t that crazy of sleep deprivation. But just not as good of a conversationalist. Because just like my brains just got this little square to operate in when I don’t get my six plus hours. And when you’re out there you’re getting maybe three hours a day. Sometimes more, sometimes less. And your brain just doesn’t have the energy to like be doing anything more than concentrating on the trail and on the dogs and everything else is just off. And the only time I’d be in my head is when I’d look at a dog and see some minor marginal change in either their body language or the way that they’re running. And be thinking, okay, what’s going on with that dog. Let’s look at the stare at this dog for the next hour, or 30 minutes or whatever, and decide, should I give this dog a break and ride with me in the sled or just looks fine, he just kind of look bored and needs to get to the next checkpoint. And those are the kinds of things where I play head games. Because I had one instance where I was at a checkpoint and one of my dogs didn’t eat, which isn’t terribly uncommon. And usually 95% of the time, I just bring the food with me. Well 100% of the time I bring the food with me and 95% of the time, they just eat the food an hour later, and they just needed to get up and move around. It’s kind of like when you wake up from a night asleep, you don’t really want to stuff your face full of food five minutes after you woke up. You want to go get a cup of coffee and read the paper and then maybe get some food in you. But this dog didn’t eat and then I started moving and he wasn’t pulling. And to me, he’s the best dog on my team. He’s not a good lead dog but I mean, the energy that he brings is better than being a lead dog. And he wasn’t pulling. And I’ve never ever, ever seen him not pull. And that’s when you get in your head, you’re wondering, alright, what’s going on here? Is this just me, like getting a little bit too neurotic about the dog, or is this actually like warranted that I am worried about this dog. And I just went ahead and turned around and sent the dog home. And you know, a lot of times, you think you see something and you don’t. And other times you were like, I don’t think I’ve seen anything and there was something. And those are the kinds of things that you’re getting in your head because it’s not obvious. And that’s why it’s so important to have somebody that’s really experienced on the sled or somebody that’s really experienced with those dogs in front of the sled. And that’s the head games for me, it’s figuring out what the dogs need. Even just like the timing of feeding them, and then what you’re feeding them and how you’re feeding it to them, those little things can make or break the next 100 miles or 50 miles or whatever. If I don’t feed them in this 15-minute window, then they’re not going to eat for the next three hours. And how are you going to prep the food in only 15 minutes? Maybe I should just give them a snack and feed them later. So those are the things that get in my head is how can I best care for these dogs and everything else you don’t have the energy to be thinking about anything else but you and your team.
Jason: You talked about the plan and I know you said the drop bags that already been sent out and you’d helped with that part of the process, but seems like a lot of the mushers to some degree, send certain things to certain checkpoints because they to some degree have a little bit of a plan in their head of you know, I’m probably going to take my 24 here, I’m probably going to take my 8 there, I’m probably going to do this, I’m thinking we’ll be expecting this here. So I’m going to pack this way and drop this and you know [inaudible 39:01] I’m going to put this at the cot, I’m going to put this here, I’m going to put this there. You didn’t really have as much control over that, because basically we’re prepping for Jeff to run the race. So how much of an impact did that have on you?
Sean: You know, the good thing is that Jeff had — I mean, he’s always been an individual thinker. And that’s why he’s won this race is because he likes to think outside the box. And I think one of the things that I’m not really sure what every other musher is doing, but he told me that he sent the exact same thing as far as dog food goes to every single checkpoint except for two. And those two checkpoints were the two places that he was considering taking his 24 at. So as far as the dog food went it was pretty much I knew what I was getting and was it huge? And then I think some of the human food that was always a surprise, you know because he ended up getting some of the local restaurants to make some to go meals and then we — what are those things — when you put them in the plastic and you suck the oxygen out? What am I thinking of?
Jason: Like vacuum sealed?
Sean: There we go. So yeah, all those vacuum-sealed meals and they were like so good. There was like enchiladas that were just like the size of my head. Then a big thing of chilli and he had Rubin’s set out and vacuum sealed. I was eating like royalty out there. And, and then he had a bunch of snacks. What I found awesome was the, like sleeves of KitKats that were eight little to two-fingered KitKats. At one point I had like, like four sleeves of KitKats in my sled and I was like, what am I going to do with all these KitKats? I got to give them to someone, so I was just like handing out KitKats to mushers and they were oooh, I love KitKat. It wasn’t problematic but there was like certain things, little tiny comfort things that were put in there that are not essential that were huge. Like he put a hand towel in a lot of the checkpoints so that when I was messing with all that raw dog food, I could just kind of wipe my hands off, he had plastic gloves also for going with the fat that you’re putting in these meals, it gets stuck everywhere and you can’t wipe that off very easily. And my buddy he gave me a pair of insulated slippers. And I was like dude, insulated slippers. Are you kidding me? He was like, dude, you just put your boots in front of the fire, let them dry out. And you can wear the slippers out if you need to go check on the dog team in between your nap time or your time you’re feeding yourself. That was like one of the most amazing things, being able to take your boots off for like six hours. And then walking around in these slippers, I was like — everybody else is walking around their boots and I was just like, man, if they only knew how comfortable my feet are right now. So some of those little things that you don’t really need, but they help you kind of just enjoy a little extra comfort out there. But yeah, it ended up being not a huge deal. But, you know, it was definitely a little bit of surprise and kind of like opening up a Christmas present at each checkpoint, wondering what’s going to be in there, but it was pretty consistent.
Jason: 58 teams ran in the 2020 Iditarod. With so many contestants following the same trail, it is difficult to imagine that a musher could find themselves completely alone for hours at a time. But how often do they really find themselves running alongside other teams?
Sean: I was talking about this with my brother the other day. He was like dude, when I was following your tracker it looked like you were just like buddy buddy with musher A and musher B. You guys were always just as close to each other. Are you guys like traveling together, like you see each other? He asked me the other day. 92% of time I did not see anybody but there was occasional times where I remember like on the way to Old Woman’s Cabin and Unanlakleet, me and Riley were within sight of each other for a while. And then at night, especially on the Yukon River where you can see for like 15 miles ahead and behind you, you can see those headlamps, but they’re just like these distant lights. And some people don’t even travel with headlamps especially if it’s a full moon, you can really see pretty well with all the white snow everywhere and I remember Martin Boozer passed me early in the race, I was like drifting off to sleep. The first two nights are like the worst nights for sleep deprivation. Because you’re like, just kind of getting into this weird rhythm. At least I was, some mushers just live that schedule. It’s pretty extreme, but some mushers just live the mushing schedule so they’re used to it by the time the race starts, but I wasn’t doing that. And so I was drifting off to sleep and then I like wake up because my dog team was like about to pull the sled from underneath me, because the dog team was right next to them and Boozer just passed me without a headlamp in the dead of night I was like, huh, pretty cool. Anyways… What was the question, I kind of got side-tracked?
Jason: Yeah, talking about how often you saw other mushers, ow often you were on your own.
Sean: Generally they weren’t within sight, but at nights you see the headlamps. And every now and again I was kind of close with a musher. Riley and I were, that’s to me that one moment, I remember where we were going through this section of trail that was so frustrating. The dogs were ready to run fast, but the trail was like, really mobily. You couldn’t really get that momentum going, because it’s one of those things where you get the, you can get up to nine miles an hour once it’s up there, the dogs just kind of got to run in front of the sled to keep it going. But when you’re going up like this and it’s flat, but it’s just the way that the snow machines pack it down and drive on the trail, it just creates this undulating Lushness Monster humps on the trail, or whatever. And it just was like, we were so stoked leaving that checkpoint, because our teams were finally fast after that snowstorm. And then we get to this section of trail, and so Riley’s right behind me, and he’s like dude, I don’t think I’m going to pass you. And I’m like, you sure you don’t want to pass me, you’re kind of on my ass here. And he’s like, no I think it’s not a good idea. And so we travel for an hour, and he’s still on my butt. He’s like, you know what man, I think I’m going to pass you and it was really narrow trail, he passes me. It’s kind of a little bit of a kerfuffle and then off he goes. Like 20 minutes later, he turns around, and he’s like dude I shouldn’t have passed you. And I’m on his butt now and he’s like — so now I’m behind him, and I’m on my break. So basically, it’s like always, the team that’s behind the other team is the one that’s going faster, and then you get out in front of the team. And now they don’t have anything to chase. And the team behind you is now faster than team — so it’s kind of we were switching back and forth all the time. And there was no right answer to it, you know, but yeah, you see them out there for sure.
Jason: How much night-time traveling did you do? What’s that like?
Sean: I mean, 50:50 night-time and daytime. I was aiming to travel at night, more than during the day because of how warm it was. The daytime, the sun is devastating to the trail, not dogs, but it’s just like you going for a run in North Carolina at 4 pm in July. It’s just not the best idea. You can do it, but your runtime is not going to be as fast and you’re going to be a lot more tired running two miles at 4 pm than you would at 8 am. And same with the dogs. If you leave a checkpoint at 11 and you run until 6pm that is just not the best-case scenario. You can do it. But if you can avoid it, your team is better off. So I spent a lot of time running at night. I actually kind of like it. I don’t know, there’s just a — especially when the moon was out man. When we went through the Alaska Range. The moon was like full moon, I did not need a headlamp. It was blowing hard, but it was clear. And I tried to take a picture of it, my crappy phone didn’t pick up the little light that there was but man it was just like you could see all the details of the mountains and it was gorgeous. I like traveling at night and then you get to the checkpoint and the sun is rising, and you feed the dogs and now the sun’s up. Or now the dogs are out there taking a nap in the heat of the day, sunbathing and you can just see it, they just look like this is like the most like deep deep sleep that they’re in and I too am ready to take a long nap as well. But yeah, it’s not that bad. You have your headlamp on and you can keep it on low and if you see something off in the distance that looks like it could be a moose, you turn it on high, it ends up being just a bush. But the Yukon River definitely was pretty rough. Like monotony wise and again, you ask any musher if monogamy is your biggest problem, you’re doing great. But it was just like impossible to stay awake. There was some sections of trail where I just sat down, and I buckled myself in and was like, I’m just going to sleep. And the dogs don’t know what they’re doing. It’s not like there’s like a Spaghetti Junction of trails out there, it’s just the one trail for the most part. That’s what we did and I liked it at night.
Jason: Alaska is the largest state in the US, covering a landmass of approximately 663,300 square miles. Alaska’s size, combined with its low population means that much of its natural land remains untouched. The Iditarod trail cuts straight through the center of it. And this 1000 mile trail enables mushers to see a significant amount of Alaska’s incredible natural beauty. So what is the scenery actually like? You sort of mentioned scenery a bit going through the Alaskan range, I think the trails portion of Alaska that not a lot of people have seen nor ever will see, what’s it like taking in the scenery from the beginning to end there, day and night
Sean: Yeah, it’s awesome man. I mean, because it just changes so much, a lot of the races are like out and back, so you’re kind of doing the same thing twice. This one’s just A to B. And so you’re always seeing something new. Going through that Dalzell Gorge, I remember, like you’re really in the mountains but you’re like in the valleys. And you like turn a corner around a mountain and you’re looking ahead, and there’s just this massive mount wall of mountain in front of you, massive walls on either side and I’m looking like, where the hell is this trail going to take us? There’s nowhere to go. And you just keep going and going. And then there’s just this little valley that’s like, 10 feet wide, and the trails in the middle of it, or your side hilling on the side of a mountain and you’re just like, who was the guy that was thinking this is probably the path of least resistance? I mean, how do they even have the guts to attempt to make it through this section? I mean, I went into this race and I didn’t even really know the order of the checkpoints. I’d get to one checkpoint and I would be like what’s the next one again? And then you get to the next checkpoint, you’re like, okay, so the next two are the Cripple and Ruby? Okay, cool. And so I was like, learning the trail. Even the names of it and the distances, I didn’t know. I remember going in the race and I was like Jeff, dude, what’s the move here? I mean, what’s that do between Cripple and Ruby, when it’s 75 miles? Should I just push through, or split it into two runs and camp in the middle. And he’s like, dude, by the time you get to mile 500, you’re going to be an expert. So don’t worry about that. Just get through that first few days. And it was true. It’s just like, you just get so in tune with everything. But yeah, it was just gorgeous. And it’s crazy to think that there are these people living in these villages that are just insanely remote. And the lifestyle is just totally unique to anything I could ever dream of and I think one of the most beautiful sceneries I saw was leaving and entering into 54:31 New Otto and you’re just like on I’m not sure which river but the river was poorly covered in snow. So you’re just like are on ice on top of a river sliding around, and a little bit out of control, but somewhat in control. And there’s just like the sunlight was out, and it was hitting the mountains like early in the morning. And it was just the last run before you leave the Alaska Range. And it’s just this big moment, kind of where you’ve conquered this incredible rugged terrain. And it was just something that I don’t even have any like proof that I did. I just didn’t bother taking out my camera, because I can barely keep it charged and then it gets cold on. I have a crappy little droid and it just — so I just soaked it all in and it was just such a beautiful place and at night you can’t exactly see everything but you know what the stars are out it’s pretty spectacular and again those full moon nights, those first four nights of the race, the ones that were clear it was just is awesome. I would go hours without putting my headlamp on during those nights. It was pretty special.
Jason: Yeah, I’ve been to Alaska a few times. And I find it difficult to articulate, pretty hard to describe.
Sean: It’s the scale man it’s like, so massive and so fast and such an abyss of land.
Jason: Even people who have visited Alaska multiple times continue to be astounded by its beauty. Names such as North to the Future, Land of the Midnight Sun, and America’s Last Frontier, have been part of Alaska’s identity for years, lending to its reputation as being something wholly unique. This lush, Arctic paradise, of indescribable splendor is home to one of the greatest sled dog races that the world has ever known. It was the final section of the race and they were closing in on the finish line. But something changed as Sean and his dog team reached the coast. In a wilderness as wild and unexpected as Alaska is, it can be easier to get into trouble than out of it.
Sean: I mean, the Coast alone, you know that right there I could write a book about it. You think the coast you think flat, windy. And one of those is right, it’s windy, but it certainly is not flat. I don’t know what you’re referring to as like the second mountain range, but there’s just like several mountains throughout the coast. And I didn’t really get the memo on that. So I was very surprised at the challenges that that Coast brought, were different than I expected. The wind was relentless. And fortunately it was warm. So it wasn’t like I was cold necessarily. But the sleds getting blown off the trail and the dogs are pointed back on the trail. And it’s just a little bit more physical for the musher and the dogs.
Jason: Sometimes you just end up in the right place at the wrong time. As one group of 2020 Iditarod mushers learned the hard way. Sean, unfortunately, was one of those motors. Stay tuned to learn what happened by the coast in one of our upcoming episodes.
I want to thank you for joining us today. In hearing rookie Iditarod musher Sean Underwood’s unique story. Although Seann’s unexpected entrance into the Iditarod world may have transpired on short notice, his mushing legacy still has a long way to go. Be sure to stay tuned to our next episode for another amazing story of adversity from veteran musher Matthew Failor.
Matthew: But his tightness in his muscle wasn’t going to heal in that short timeframe. So I sent him home in the third checkpoint. So quickly down on dogs within the first day and a half, from 14 to 12. And that was the writing on the wall, just small little nicks and dings and…
Jason: Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss any of our upcoming episodes. And be sure to check out our great stories from season one. For even more content, visit our website atalifeofdogs.com. If you enjoy our stories, be sure to give us a five-star rating and share our podcast with your friends. This episode produced by Jason Ferguson. Story, Stasha Dempson.
We leave you with this episode with a bit of sad news. Earlier this month, Alaskan legend a music icon Hobo Jim Vossos passed away after a battle with cancer. As a tribute, we leave you with his song Where Legends are Born.
Peak Performance
Which factor determines the success of a world-class team of athletes?
Is it an insatiable desire to succeed? Is it the benefits of a comprehensive training program? Perhaps it’s a truly unbreakable level of trust in one another? Or maybe it is an unrelenting focus on the physical and mental wellbeing of the team?
The reality is that, at the top level of any team sport you can think of, all of those elements play a significant part in achieving success. After all, to win a World Series, or a Super Bowl, or a Stanley Cup, you need to have that desire to succeed. You need to train. You need to trust one another. And you need to take care of your team.
It is no different in the Iditarod – the world’s greatest sled dog race, pitting teams of mushers in an annual race through the Alaskan wilderness. In the Iditarod, these crucial components all contribute towards the success of a musher and their team of dogs. The Iditarod is the pinnacle of the sled dog world, and it takes physical and mental endurance to withstand the inevitable obstacles faced in a 900 mile race in treacherous conditions.
When we visited Alaska to witness the Iditarod in 2020, we were fortunate to see first-hand the dedication required for these human-dog partnerships to succeed. The care and attention placed upon the dogs who participate in the Iditarod is of utmost importance to the organizers, veterinarians, volunteers, and naturally, the mushers themselves – one of the most important aspects of good teamwork in the Iditarod is recognizing the health and wellbeing of your team.
We wanted to dive deeper to understand precisely what steps are taken to develop these world-class athletes, in addition to getting more information on the level of care they receive during the race. For this episode, we spoke to a number of people, including mushers, veterinarians, and even the CEO of the Iditarod.
In this episode, you’ll learn about:
- The difference between a finely-tuned sled dog competing in the Iditarod and a regular pet dog
- How the Iditarod is a celebration of the passion and purpose of sled dogs
- The development of canine nutrition to improve performance
- How the Iditarod’s squad of volunteer veterinarians help to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the dogs competing in the race
- Misinformation and threats to the race from animal rights groups
The musher’s perspective
DeeDee Jonrowe is a world-class musher and one of the most well-known figures in the sport. Jonrowe finished as a runner-up in the Iditarod three times in the 1990s. She also won the award for Most Inspirational Musher in 2003, when she competed in the Iditarod just a matter of weeks after finishing chemotherapy following a breast cancer diagnosis.
Jonrowe explains what really makes a great sled dog, and how a musher builds a strong relationship with their team of dogs, enabling them to identify the dog’s physical and mental state. Above all else, mushers have a duty of care to the dogs they are working with, and Jonrowe highlights how this helps them to recognize the potential limits of their team’s capabilities.
As with any athlete, good nutrition can have a significant impact on performance. Jonrowe also covers the importance of types of food; how working dog nutrition has become a science in itself; and why mushers adjust their dog’s food intake based on a number of different factors.
The veterinarian’s perspective
When the Iditarod rolls around each year, a team of volunteer veterinarians assembles in Alaska. The team works tirelessly before, during and after the event to help ensure the safety and wellbeing of every dog competing in the race.
Veronica DeVall is one of those veterinarians. Her passion and love for animals is evident as she describes the hard yet rewarding work of playing her part in the Iditarod. DeVall’s experiences with dogs in the Iditarod even helped to develop her perspective on veterinary medicine as a whole.
Having worked on numerous Iditarods, DeVall has several memorable stories to tell. These dedicated veterinarians play an essential role in the running of the Iditarod – their invaluable contribution cannot be understated.
The organization's perspective
Rob Urbach is the CEO of the Iditarod. Prior to assuming this role in 2019, Urbach had worked as CEO at USA Triathlon for six and half years, and has over two decades of leadership experience.
Urbach could not have taken on the role of CEO at a more tumultuous time; the 2020 Iditarod coincided with the start of the largest pandemic for a century. The Iditarod was the last major global sporting event to navigate through COVID-19. Urbach was instrumental in constructing a Covid prevention plan for the 2021 iteration of the race.
In addition to the challenges presented by the pandemic, Urbach has had to deal with ongoing threats from animal rights activists to the very existence of the race. He talks about how misinformation can spread like wildfire, leading to false narratives.
With its unique place in Alaskan history – combined with amazing human-sled dog teams, strong organizational leadership, and support from dog lovers and sled dog enthusiasts around the globe – it seems like the Iditarod has a formidable base on which to build its future.
Podcast Transcript
Click ‘Show transcript’ below to read the transcript from this episode of A Life of Dogs.
A Life of Dogs Podcast – Season Two, Episode Five (S2, E5)
Episode Name: Peak Performance
Host
Jason Purgason
Guests
Various
Duration
1:09:48
Broadcast Date
September 8, 2021
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Female Narrator
Support for a life of dogs is brought to you by Royal Canin. Royal Canin offers precise effective nutrition for dogs based on size, age, breed and to address specific needs. To learn more about Royal Canine, visit them on the web at royalcanin.com. And by Highland Canine Training, the industry leader in Professional Dog Training Solutions and premier canine education. Highland Canine Training offers turnkey solutions for everyone, from pet owners to law enforcement and military organizations. Learn more at highlandcanine.com
Speaker 1:
These dogs they’re well taken care of, they are the elite athletes. They have to be to get there. Yes, physiologically, these dogs, you know dogs out of any species are incredible.
Jason:
The Iditarod, for 49 years, this iconic race has stood as the pinnacle of dog sporting events. A team of dogs and human musher courageously brave the elements for days, traveling over a thousand miles over the Alaskan wilderness in a partnership like no other. They must diligently withstand storms, obstacles and wildlife; constantly pushing forth to make it back home and across the finish line. This is not a feat for just any team of dogs or any musher. Both the dogs and the people who partake in the Iditarod are incredible athletes, they must perform at their best, both mentally and physically. What kind of dog does it take to embrace such a challenge? And what goes into developing an athlete capable of doing so? From A Life of Dogs, I’m Jason Ferguson and this is Peak Performance.
DeeDee:
I started racing the Iditarod for my rookie year, my first year in 1980, when I was living in Western Alaska in Bethel actually where last year’s champion Pete Kaiser is from. And my goals — I’ve done a lot of winter travel but I haven’t done much with dog teams. I’ve owned dogs all my life, but I hadn’t actually had them in teams. So my goal was to just travel across the state of Alaska because it was just thrilling. And with the way that I most enjoy, which is dogs, I just love being with dogs and having, not a million dogs, but having numerous dogs that have tasks to do. I mean, training dogs is my passion. And I was a biologist out there for the state of Alaska at the time. And so I would train at night and on the weekends. And then, back in those days we didn’t have any qualifiers. I mean, the race was only eight years or eight years old at the time, and this year was it’s 48th running. And when I went out, I have to say,it was overwhelming, it’s probably the best thing to say. It just seems like such a monumental task and the best advice I got from anybody was you take care of your dogs, and they’ll take care of you.
Jason:
This is DeeDee Jonrowe, a world-class musher with an impressive record. She is a three-time runner up in the Iditarod race and possesses the fastest time ever recorded for a woman finisher. She has completed the race over 22 times with her dog team, as well as other sled dog races all over the world.
DeeDee:
When I started that race in 1980, I had never finished a long-distance race nor had any other dogs in my team. We were all rookies. And I just became focused. I mean, the one thing I knew how to do was feed dogs and take care of and talk to, and be around dogs. As far as knowing as much sports medicine as I know about them now, I wasn’t even a clue. Most of that wasn’t even thought of. But I entered that race in 1980 and ended up — there were 36 scratches that year. And I ended up finishing 24th and meeting for the first time Martin Buser who finished 22nd right in front of me with a purebred Siberian team. And that was his rookie year and we became friends. We didn’t know each other as well as we do now, but we became friends out there. I can never forget, he was feeding the dogs in White Mountain and we’re all fixated on trying to make sure they get hydration and that everything we give them is plenty moist enough. And his Siberians were saying I don’t want that stuff. And he poured it out on the snow and they gobbled it up. And he goes, these silly dogs think the whole world is a big dogs dish.
Jason:
Just as Martin Buser dogs demonstrated, Huskies are born to love the snow. But what really makes a good sled dog? What is the magic ingredient that separates a dog from a successful Iditarod athlete? Deedee explains.
DeeDee:
They’re bred for function and they’re bred for purpose. So these are dogs that are bred because they’ve got a good digestive system, they’ve got good insulative properties, they’ve got good feet, they’ve got a mind for it, they want to please. They’re really dogs that are wanting to run and pull. The biggest thing is if you were to try to teach them, and I have over the years, obedience or agility or something, they’re less eager for that than they are for just pulling. They’re all about pulling.
Jason:
Getting a dog to pull a sled, even hundreds of miles or more, isn’t difficult when it’s what they live to do. Take it from a seasoned Iditarod veteran. Although a sled dog might run forever if they could, a massive amount of energy is required to successfully complete long races. So how do mushers make sure that their dog team has enough energy to complete a race with enthusiasm to spare?
DeeDee:
Techniques, things of that nature, plus I had access to a bigger breeding pool. And so I raced for years not only dogs that I raised, but also I raced different kinds of races. I raced for four years in the Alps in a kind of a Tour de France format, where I took twelve dogs to Europe, and we raced stage racing throughout the Alps; and then came home and a month later would raise the Iditarod. My husband would keep my Iditarod team training in a long and slower pace while I was in Europe doing a faster speed, but yet they were still distance. Probably the longest run we ever did was about 70 miles in one day. And then I think I had some of my best successes in those years. I had second place in the Iditarod and third place in the Alps, [inaudible 07:56] singular year and that was pretty amazing for me. It was definitely a huge learning curve for me because I learned that the dog’s ability to deal with environmental changes, for instance, warmth or mushy snow compared to 50 below and snow that’s sugary, and has no moisture in it at all, all of those things were different aspects of training, and then as you would run through those different kinds of conditions, you had different kinds of encouragement for them. Like in warm weather, I snacked often but with a watery kind of snack, in cold weather I snacked often but with a very fatty snack. I never wanted to see too much variety in their metabolic sugar run. I guess that’s the best way to put it. But I tried to always feed before they got tired, feed before they were hungry, water every opportunity that I could observe that they would be willing to take water and how to run rest schedules worked in different settings and stuff. And I learned to adapt to individual dogs, and a good example is just one dog that I had that was just phenomenal. He was a really good dog but he was shy. And he didn’t like to eat and in public. And I had him in Europe. And one day at the start of one of our races, there was hot air balloons and cross country skiers, over 10,000 people there. And it’s pretty obvious Perry wasn’t going to eat in that situation. So I fed him inside the truck, quietly by himself and he gobbled his food and his water up like that, fine. But it was like if people were watching him, not interested, don’t want to.
Jason:
A good musher always puts the well-being of their dogs above their own. Being able to successfully do this, however, requires that a musher is so in tune with their team that they know exactly what they need and when. A musher has to understand what their dog is experiencing mentally and psychologically, in order to take the best care of their dogs as possible. So how do they do this? DeeDee tells us how she learned about this and was able to overcome some of the pitfalls associated with high-level performance athletes.
DeeDee:
And I found out I was the same way. The harder I trained, the more intense my program was, the less interested in eating I was, which was not good, not helpful. And I personally realized that I must, and dogs don’t necessarily have that ability to be rational. And so it gave me a new insight into what I needed to do, and how I needed to present food and when I needed to present water, and how to encourage them to keep their hydration up and things. So I think that is one of the hugest lessons, was to put myself in their shoes and realize that some of the explanations that we had had about, oh, they’re just stressed out because they ran through town or something like that, was more about training than it was about the particular event. And I just learned a phenomenal amount, and about hydration, and about recovery, and about training, the amount of training at any one personal time, when I needed to give a recovery day. Just following somebody else’s schedule wasn’t the ticket. And I had great success with all of that.
Jason:
Feeding Iditarod sled dogs enough food is critical to optimizing their athletic capabilities. But simply feeding them is not enough. Feeding the correct type of food and adjusting it according to output and environmental factors is just as important. Working dog nutrition has become a science and one that mushers take very seriously.
DeeDee:
I think, you know, when I worked with some of these dogs, I think I might even have told you, you know, so I ended up working with some of the different nutritional companies and Royal Canin was one that I was with for 15 or so years. And so I got the opportunity to travel to Europe and see their facilities and see some of the different dogs that they had dealt with over there. And they were in collaboration with some of the herding dogs out of Spain and some other working breeds. It was fascinating to see how our working breed worked with theirs. And it was, I mean, I think the canine world really gained a great deal, especially in the early 90s when there was no premium kibble dog food on the shelves in those days. Nobody paid attention to the ingredients. But of course, we did because performance was important. And then today, you will find that anybody that has a working dog, and I mean a working dog being anything from a seeing-eye dog to a therapy dog, to a herding dog, and/or maybe one of our Arctic racing dogs, they all pay a great deal of attention to nutrition. They totally understand that just as we’ve learned in the Olympics, we’ve learned that in basically the Olympics of dogs behavior with the Iditarod. And the Iditarod has been able to give researchers an opportunity to observe multiple dogs that are all in shape, that all have been taken carefully through a training season so that they are all athletic. They’ve been watched through their ECGs, they have blood work, they have all of this background and similar background. And then they can watch these dogs in performance and gain amazing information, just like we saw that big learning curve in Olympic athletes years ago. Now, there’s small increments that make the difference. It used to be, there was huge increments.
Jason:
Yeah, we see nutrition plays a big role in the police, dog service dogs and working dogs that we train, definitely. It makes a huge, huge difference.
DeeDee:
It’s so amazing. It makes a difference in what they are even capable of learning.
Jason:
Mushers love their dogs. In many instances, their lives are completely dedicated to these incredible animals. The care, training and health of their team is what not only enables them to cross the finish line but also to know that they are doing everything possible to keep their team safe and happy. With knowing one’s dogs also comes the responsibility of knowing how much to push them.
DeeDee:
Never ever, ever tire of watching dogs. So watching dogs work, going to any exhibit or anything is interesting to me. So I go to as many opportunities as I possibly can. And I had seen Brett’s team in the Copper and I went that team is solid. It’s the word I could think of. They aren’t exuberant, they aren’t tired, they are just solid. So when he came in behind Jesse, Jesse was carrying a dog at that point. So her team looked like they had worked hard, probably carrying that dog [inaudible 16:58] right before Ruby. But I thought, oh, okay, well, these two teams, Jesse drops that dog she’s going to be okay. And then in comes Thomas’ team and this team is just off the wall eager, happy, banging, he could hardly keep his hook in. They’d just come off a 90-mile run. And I just went, oh, okay, this, this is the best team I have seen. And then as the race went on, I’m watching the team in different checkpoints and in comes this team that is riding the magic carpet. And when I talked to Thomas, he said those were basically three-year-olds. They had never, ever seen the red line. They had never, ever been driven to the point of okay, we just got to get there. They were only happy, that’s all they’d ever seen. They’ve been taken incrementally to each next distance and they were never overwhelmed. So they didn’t know what that looked like. And I got to tell you, I agree. I think he’s telling the absolute truth because there’s no way you can have a dog team that was as happy as that dog team was, all the time, without they never knew anything but happy.
Jason:
Running the Iditarod is not simply about the race. It’s about the incomparable partnership that mushers share with their dog team. The magic that makes an Iditarod dog team doesn’t stop at physical capability, but it’s deeply ingrained in a sled dogs being.
DeeDee:
These dogs are special. They’re not dogs that are bred in the backyard, they’re not dogs that are always blow-dried and put in a show ring to go around in circles. And I have nothing against dogs that do that when they’re looking for the best of the best in the breeds, nothing against that at all. But our dogs, we’re looking for the best of the best on the trail, in the trail setting, in utilizing the instincts God gave them for navigating storms, for finding trails, for being able to work in a partnership with man so that you avoid the hazards and you pursue the open trail when it’s there. I can tell you, so I don’t even have time to tell you, but all the times dogs, my leaders have saved me from something around the corner I couldn’t see. Be it open water or a moose charging at us, or a buffalo charging us as it did a few years ago. And my leader just dove under some deadfall and took the whole fifteen dog team with him in there and with that big bull, elderly buffalo charging at us, nobody, nobody got clipped by a hoof. I mean, that kind of instinctive partnership between a dog and a man, between drama, you can’t fake that, you can’t pretend that in the ring, you can’t make that up and you can’t portray it really all that well on the screen. It’s a gut thing that — I mean, I was just stunned; I was scared, scared, scared when that buffalo decided to turn and charge us. And I had already tried to move that buffalo off the trail and I got kind of up close in front of my dog team and I wouldn’t even come up to his shoulders. And I went, whoa, I don’t have very many tools here. But my leader that I had spent all summer with the year before, on-on-one canicross training to try to help him get the confidence that he could make those decisions. He did, he did it and he saved all fifteen dogs that were in that team.
Jason:
There are no words to truly describe the powerful partnership that the Iditarod mushers have with their dog teams. It can be witnessed and felt in the cold Alaskan air as the team’s take off, and as they eventually cross the finish line at the end of the race. The bond between these teams is as unique as the race itself. As DeeDee exemplified, if a mature takes care of their dogs, their dogs will take care of them. The well-being of the dog teams is at the forefront of the Iditarods priority list. As much as the mushers work hard to keep their dogs safe and healthy, they can only do so much on their own. In order to ensure that every canine athlete is functioning at their very best and is fit to continue running, plenty of veterinarians are present to conduct wellness checks before, during and after the race.
Next, we speak to Veronica Devall, a veterinarian who volunteers days of her life each year to ensuring the Iditarod dog teams finish the race in as good a condition as they started.
Veronica:
So my name is Veronica Devall. I’ve been a veterinarian for over 30 years. How I got involved? Well, that’s a long story. But I would have to say, first years out of vet school, I adopted an injured Siberian Husky. And from there, I always had an interest with the sporting dogs, but it just led me a little bit more down the rabbit hole, so to speak. And I met some other veterinarians that lived up north, specifically in the Yukon. And I thought with this Siberian Husky, I wanted to learn a little bit more about the breed. And I volunteered. My first race was Yukon Quest. And that was, let’s see, that was late 90s. So I’ve been involved with the sled dog sport for over 20 years. From that time, I’ve pretty much done almost a race a year. I went from the Quest to Iditarod and now I’m back and forth with the Iditarod; not every year but one of the races that I also work with and I just got back on Sunday, was down in Wyoming. And it’s a little bit of a different race. It’s not a long-distance endurance, it’s more of a — Well, they call it a stage stop race based on the European races, where there’s days of racing. So they do 30 miles to 35 miles daily, different stages; so start and stop, everybody is timed. And they kind of do like a Tour de France where the yellow bit goes out, the fastest time is last to leave. So it’s different, meaning, these dogs are racing every day but they are going much faster and it’s not endurance, it’s sprint racing through the week. So that’s a little bit how I got involved. I’m sorry it’s a very long answer. You got me talking about sled dogs. And so I just had an interest and then it becomes — you can talk to a number of us that do this for years and we certainly have a special bond with our group. We love the dogs. We love working with these athletes. There’s nothing like it in practice. It took me going through these years and I actually developed more specialty in sports medicine, I actually am a specialist in canine sports medicine, probably because of my involvement with sled dogs. So yeah, so that’s a long answer, but that’s where I fit in.
Jason:
Awesome! So do you feel like working with sled dogs has, to some degree sort of helped you be a better vet or helped you in your veterinary career?
Veronica:
Yeah, absolutely. From there, I wanted to get my hands on these dogs. And again, they are the elite athletes. So, when do you ever get to in practice, unless you become a specialist to deal with these athletes, in such a very focused timeframe over the 10 days to two weeks? So I would say yes, for sure. Because we are always palpating. And so I think, I know, my skills of palpation has certainly escalated when I started working with these dogs in this type of quick little assessments, but having to pick up these things very quickly. We’re talking these guys that are running all the time. So we’re checking, we’re doing orthopedic exams repetitively, every day, several times a day on all these dogs. So yeah, I would have to say, for sure, it’s made me better at what I do with my hands and certainly made me want to be in general practice here, focus on what more can I do, rather than just a general practitioner. That’s again, why I’ve gone into sports medicine and rehabilitation. So yeah, it’s absolutely helped with that.
Jason:
Helping to care for the Iditarod dog teams is something that these vets are extremely passionate about. As Veronica described, volunteering in these races actually revolutionized her practice and her perspective on veterinary medicine as a whole. But what motivates a veterinarian to become involved with the Iditarod anyways?
Veronica:
It becomes a, I don’t want to call it a bit of an addiction, but it is. I like to be involved with the race, meaning, as a veterinarian, we’re not just policing [inaudible 27:45] but we’re there to improve the sport, make sure the dogs are healthy, make sure that we are behind, you know what these dogs — they can’t speak for themselves, but to make sure that this is exactly what they want to do. I want to make sure these dogs are happy. Because they are bred to run so they have that drive for sure. The other thing is, I’ve been involved in certainly the development of the sport over the years. A ton of research has gone into these sled dogs, and we’ve discovered many different things. Big one is in nutrition, exercise, physiology, what can apply to our animals, our pals at home. So that is why I’m involved. I have this addiction. I love these dogs. A lot of my friends have come through this world. I guess it’s just kind of part of me, it’s second nature to me to be involved in the race somehow. And through that I actually have Siberian Huskies. One is a retired sled dog. So it just becomes part of what we do. There is a number of us veterinarians that we do it every year, and I think you’ll probably get the same answer that we just love the sport and we want to definitely be a part of that sport. For sure, taking care of the dogs and making sure that they are healthy, and that we research to see if we can find what can help these dogs or just knowing what goes through their system. I think lately with some of these research, finding out that long-distance, just like in people, we can find that their immune systems can be a little compromised. And so we want to make sure that the race is not too stressful on them. So those are those things, but also just what we found with the dogs, these sled dogs being such incredible athletes and the amount of calories that they take in it, there’s nothing like it and just how they are these little natural physiological machines to run these miles. I don’t want to use that term machine, but I just think they really are incredible creatures.
Jason:
There’s a special type of magic in the air during the Iditarod. A spectator can feel the energy radiating from the dog teams as they make their way across the starting line. And it’s an energy that is as unique as the race itself. The Iditarod vet will be one of the first to tell bystanders, that this race was life-changing for them. That working with these incredible animals has transformed their appreciation for dogs and what they’re capable of.
Veronica:
I think part of the Iditarod, obviously, the dogs bring us all together. But sometimes it’s just in those quiet moments that maybe not, when the main racers have gone by and we’re at a checkpoint waiting, we have some dogs that are left behind. Meaning they’re tired or there’s something that has kept them behind, a sore wrist and we’re taking care of them. So it’s kind of quiet, all the racers have gone through, and then we just have some time to prepare the checkpoint for closing. So we’re getting the dogs flown out. And I think that’s probably one of my favorite times, is not being in the hype of the race. Because honestly, it’s just reactions when you’re not — You’re there, you’re helping them, it is a race environment. So number one, we’re taking care of the dogs, but when we have some time, whether it’s a colleague or two or just the other volunteers at the checkpoint, I think we’re just having some laughs about who knows? We’re so tired after that. So I think I don’t have any one specific time, but I would say those are my memories, getting to know the villagers, because it is a very unique situation in Iditarod. And depending on the northern route or southern route, if I go back, sometimes I don’t see these people for a few years. And what’s really crazy is that they remember my name from four years ago. So I think just those times. So not only with the dogs, but the dogs bring us all together and we have a passion for the sled dogs, and I think those are probably my fondest memories with that. I mean, obviously the dogs, when they are relaxed too, they are like dogs. They’re racing individuals, but they just love hearing their name, they love getting the pats. So those are kind of, I would think the quiet times and the fun times for me.
Jason:
The quiet times and the fun times, those truly memorable moments, which happen once the excitement has died down, and the world once again seems quiet. Veronica is not the only vet who appreciates the beauty of the Iditarod. Many veterinarians, canine professionals and dog lovers alike partake in this event. With nearly fifty dog teams racing at sixteen dogs per team, it is imperative that there are enough vets to make sure that every dog is adequately checked and monitored. So how many veterinarians volunteer to help in the Iditarod and what is it like?
Veronica:
There’s usually about 40 veterinarians through the race. That’s not meaning that 40 stay, but from the start to the finish. The head of it usually recruits about 40 veterinarians to help them through the race. That’s the magic number and sometimes there’s less, sometimes there’s more and there’s a certain number of what they call rookie veterinarians. So their first Iditarod, they may not be rookies at all veterinarians, but rookies meaning their first Iditarod. But usually it’s about the 40. So that’s all volunteers. We take the time off to go and do the race. So it is a little bit crazy, but that’s one thing. There’s nothing like it.
Jason:
So the next question I have is, you sort of prompted, talk to again number of mushers. Particularly some of the more experienced ones talk about lack of sleep, obviously right and trying to plan that. Does that have any impact on you guys at the checkpoints? Do you have tons of teams coming through at one time and as such you don’t get a lot of sleep or is it super exhausting or…?
Veronica:
Absolutely! Depending on where you’re working in the race, for sure the first number of checkpoints are a little insane. Of course, we have a lot of vets on but I recall checkpoints on the early part of the race where there’s 7-8 veterinarians, and all of us would work for that early rush, especially in the heavy years when there was a lot of races and I’m talking over a hundred mushers. We would be 8-9 hours straight through all eight of us. So that doesn’t seem — It seems like a workday, right? If you say eight hours. But when you get no breaks at all and you’re constantly — it’s kind of like you do a little bit of triage, you’re seeing these animals come through, making sure there are no severe issues and what is done. And these guys also are racing, so they don’t have a lot of time. So the checkpoints are, if they’re staying for a period of time, we go through, we assess them, but we try to check — well we do we check every dog that comes through. It might be a quick heart rate, we’re checking their hydration, we’re looking to see that there are no problems with dehydration, that they’re running okay, that their mucous membrane color is good, all that. And then when they stay we can do more detailed exams. So yes, I would say also, depending on how many days you do, we do go through some sleep deprivation because it’s a 24-hour clock. So we do set up our times, we take shifts, but that’s kind of part of it. I don’t go to sled dog races to sleep, we’re out 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning and we’re checking dogs. And I would say that was one — you know, we talked about the memory. I recall one of those checkpoints 3 o’clock, 4 o’clock in the morning, I don’t know, and checking dogs and clear sky, full moon, and one of the dogs starts howling and then all the dogs start howling. That’s pretty cool, right? They’re all singing for probably a minute and for no reason, I think just to say, hey, you know, everybody’s calling out and then stop completely all at the same time.
Jason:
Although the work they do at the Iditarod is demanding, the services provided by these vets is invaluable. The Iditarod is not the type of event that many people ever get the opportunity to experience for themselves. Because of this, we wanted to know what one of the most common misconceptions that people have about the race is. Veronica explained.
Veronica:
Myth? That’s a good one. That’s a good question because it really has me thinking. I think… I mean, a myth is almost mystical, right? So I guess, misconception maybe, is that these dogs are made to run. And I think you need to — I don’t want to put it into Hollywood terms, but you really need to experience a sled dog race. It may not be the Iditarod but any kind of sled dog race and knowing what sled dogs do, that this is their a thing. And racing dogs, that’s what they do. So I think the misconception that I think a lot of people have is, you’re making them do that. And you can’t — the dog is not going to be made to do that. I’ve seen dogs that they go, I’m tired, I’m not going right. And I’ve seen teams, they just had one last year that he was in the lead and the dogs just decided they weren’t going to run anymore. So they all said no, I’m not doing it. So I really think that’s the misconception that a lot of the general public have. And if I ever thought that there was some of those issues, I probably wouldn’t be involved in it so. I don’t know, any other myths. I mean, it’s a race. It’s a very cool race that’s still going on. There’s a lot of dogs out there, there’s a lot of people that make this happen, there’s a ton of volunteers, there are all these villages that are a part of it, there are the plains that you have to — There are tons of organizations, but I would say that’s probably the biggest misconception.
Jason:
How would mushers describe what you do?
Veronica:
Well, I think it depends on the race. Because certainly Iditarod, because there’s 40 of us, sometimes we’ll see the same, depending on the year and the weather. Last year, I got stuck in one checkpoint. So I saw mushers once and then not again. But other years, I’ll see them and it’s great. Because then you can see how they’re doing, what are these dogs; even if you see them enough times, you can remember some of the dog’s names. I think they appreciate that, but also, it’s tough. There’s a lot of mushers, a lot of dogs, a lot of vets. So something like a long-distance race, especially the Iditarod, it’s difficult to have that. Now, the Quest, you follow the teams, there are not as many players, not as many vets, so definitely, you’re going to get these vets that you see. The stage stop race, those more sprint races. I really enjoy those because these are formulated as these guys go out. All these mushers know there’s not many vets, there’s four on that team that I just at, they know us all. We are working with them every day, we’re working with those dogs because they get breaks. So that’s the other thing with these stage races, they have a pool of dogs, they can run as many as 10 out of a pool of 14, and dogs that need rest, they get rest and then we can check to see if there’s a certain muscle pull where they have to massage and treat and all that. So those are in my field, what I do with sports medicine. And again, it’s like people running a long-distance race or triathletes or whatever, you have that team of physiotherapists or massage therapists. So we’re kind of their team. So I think those are much more involved with the vet crew this way. The vets on the Iditarod, we’re just making sure we don’t have any tired dogs, so we’re going through them. Because when you get sleep deprived mushers, I think they really, hopefully, they appreciate the veterinarians coming in and saying, okay, this is what we got. So I think it, there’s probably an array of thoughts to what the mushers think of us. Some of them think that we’re hugely like an asset and some of them they’re just fun and down a little bit, depending. So I would like to think it’s all warm and fuzzy, but we’re a necessity. I would say they would probably think we’re a necessity, and some would think they learn a ton from us. But others maybe when they’re trying to get to the next checkpoint and we have to make sure we’re checking all the dogs, or making sure they’re eating right, especially with a sleep-deprived musher, it might not be so. So there are different emotions. And I’m only telling you this because over the years, I’ve seen that.
Jason:
The last great race has been around for decades. As this episode is being released, staff, volunteers and dog teams alike are preparing to celebrate the Iditarod’s 50th Anniversary. A momentous milestone for an event that has become as deeply ingrained in Alaska’s DNA as the shimmering white snow itself. Sled dog races have been popular throughout the world since the 1800s, but it wasn’t always this way. There was a time where dog sledding was the popular means of transportation in the Arctic climates. And actually, it still is in some places. So what kind of jobs did sled dogs have before races like the Iditarod began?
Veronica:
They were a huge thing. I mean, they hauled freight, they were mail carriers. Before, there was no machine.
Jason:
The Iditarod serves as a tribute to sled dogs of the past. Some of these dogs and their mushers risk their own lives to save the lives of others. And these great feats inspired a brand new generation. Just as with many of the original working dog breeds, most of their jobs have been replaced by man-made equipment and machinery. Even though most of these dogs no longer have jobs, their drive to work has not lessened. These dogs live to run, it is their passion and their purpose. Although the Iditarod sled dogs, may be some of the world’s most elite canine athletes, this race is not without risk. What’s probably the number one reason or one number one cause that dogs actually get pulled? Is it dehydration? Is that a sprained elbow? Is it…
Veronica:
So that’s a good question because there’s been a lot of research on this. And I don’t have the exact years but I know this because as a rehab sports medicine specialist it’s important to know what goes on with these sporting dogs. But the number one is, they call it orthopedics. So it’s not specially or specific, but it is shoulder strain is really it. So we can determine specific muscles, but it’s again a strain.
Jason:
Be sure to stay with us. When we return we speak with Iditarod CEO, Rob Urbach and get his take on the race. And we explore how animal rights activists are working to have an impact on the Iditarod.
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Jason:
The creation of an Iditarod sled dog requires great amounts of care, training, passion, diligence and love. These magnificent animals are the focal point of their mushers life. And as we have seen significant amounts of scientific data and care go into optimizing their well-being, both on and off the trail. We spoke with Rob Urbach, CEO of the Iditarod to learn about his experience getting involved in the race, and how the IDitarod executives mediated some of the unique challenges associated with the 2020 race.
Rob:
This is my first year, the Iditarod as being in this role. And I was amazed that most of the dogs that came in and finished looked like they could turn around and go a thousand miles back to Anchorage and never bother quitting. They’re kind of upset that race is over. So that’s really the cool thing for me is, people don’t realize the dogs are doing what they were bred and built to do. It’s hard to relate to it because the average pet certainly [inaudible 49:27], PETA will say things like Rob doesn’t understand. All dogs are emotionally and biologically the same. And I’ll say if that were true then I’m sure Chihuahua would love to run the Iditarod but I’m pretty sure Chihuahua is not going to able to make it. So you got to understand, especially, you obviously know breeds and so there’s such a variance in breeds.
Jason:
The modern day Alaskan Husky has become a combination of breeds, all selectively chosen for their stamina, speed, strength, health and personality. These dogs are born for their job. This much is clear. But what about the mushers? It takes a special kind of individual to persevere through the elements, braving the obstacles that the wild Alaskan wilderness throws at them along the way. These mushers do all of this while simultaneously caring for and monitoring the health of up to sixteen dogs. So what makes an Iditarod musher?
Rob:
I think that we are sort of the anecdote to the thumb-generation and so you’re disconnected with what it means to be human. Think about how we live on our phones and screens and connectivity, but there’s nothing more sort of primal about crossing the Alaskan wilderness with in for those of you that are dog people, their relationship with the dogs, you see it up close, it’s just absolutely extraordinary. So the challenge, and I’ve been in the sports business, and so what I do say is, I’ve been to Super Bowls and Final Fours and World Series games and three Olympics but there’s nothing that compares to this. It’s gritty, it’s pure, it’s authentic, if you want to be inspired, follow the Iditarod. There’s trials and tribulations along the way, there are things in the race that change dramatically over the course of the day. It takes incredible endurance, incredible determination and mushers are tough people. They’re just part Magellan, they’re part strategists, they’re meteorologists, they’re Macgyvers, but they’re all super tough people. And their ability to deal with whatever nature throws them, whatever the competitor show them and keeping, staying attuned to their dogs and understanding how they connect and lead their dogs, physically and emotionally and holistically from a wellness standpoint, the combination there’s just nothing like it. There’s no comparable and I’ve been around athletes and sports for a long time, and my view of the Iditarod is incomparable.
Jason:
From its inception, the Iditarod has been one of the most momentous dog sporting events in the world. Mushers travel from all over the globe with their dog teams to partake in the race. Diligently training for months or years to prepare for the days they will spend out on the Iditarod trail. Although the race itself is full of surprises, no one could have foreseen the events that would unfold during the 2020 event.
So you mentioned Coronavirus and that impact and how things had to be moved and I saw online it appeared as though they sort of made a checkpoint. I can’t remember which one it was, but they took an older building, went in, cleaned it out, had a wood stove set up and had a place for those mushers in it. So what was that like? What kind of impact did that have? Was that a last-minute scramble? Or did you have any time to plan for that? Or…?
Rob:
Well, everything was changing hour by hour. So I was in daily contact with the medical authorities, the Chief Medical Officer of Alaska, I was on a call with the governor, I was on a call with both senatorial offices. A lot was just enveloping as the race took off. So we ended up navigating around villages. You’re right, you saw that that was old Shaktoolik, we had to navigate around other communities as well. So we had to alter the trail to get around any population centers and these are really small, 1800 people, villages or in the case of a White Mountain or Safety, hardly any people around, but there is some. And we were super diligent regarding our hygiene. We had flown out disinfecting wipes and spray bottles and hand sanitizers and left that with those communities that we didn’t use. So we were making these adjustments and we’ve scaled down our crew, so folks had to work, double and triple shifts that normally are getting relieved. Our veterinarians instead of being replaced with fresh vets were staying on the trail longer. So we had to stretch our troops significantly because we weren’t flying anyway in for the lower 48 as we normally have. There’s about [inaudible 55:20] volunteers that worked that race and we had to do that with less this year, because we discouraged, lower 48 travel into Alaska for the event and pared down our staff to mission-critical and essential. And so some of the media people, photography, those kinds of services, we really had to stretch and I had to — our insider crew is largely Washington State based and there was some rivers, they’d be locked out of state, they get, you know, families and kids and schools were breaking out and some of these folks had to return so we had to cut our insider coverage a little bit short towards the end. I had to step up personally in a few cases and make things happen. So we improvised and kind of like what a musher would, the mushers managed through difficulties and weather changes and broken sleds and getting lost on the trail and so much happens, it never contemplated. If you follow the race closely, you saw the even 11 tried to lead twice and got hemmed in by storms. If you didn’t, we had a helicopter, Blackhawk helicopter rescue three that got stuck in kind of a flood. So we had enough chaos to manage through that it made everything more challenging, then when you rope on the virus on top of that, I think it qualifies as the people that have been around for 25 or 30 years has made it the most challenging race ever.
Jason:
The Iditarod is an event held near and dear to the hearts of many. All over the world it has become a significant part of Alaska’s identity, bringing thousands together from across the globe to watch as World Class sled dog teams race across the Arctic tundra in a contest of time, passion and will. But not everyone views the Iditarod this way. In more recent years, animal rights activist groups just PETA have taken a forceful stance against the great race.
Chuck:
My name is 57:24 Chuck Towski and I’m the spokesperson for Anchorage Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram since 1980. I’ve been involved in the race since ’78, when I did the sports and news at Channel 2 in Anchorage. What I can tell you is that the sled dogs are world class athletes and treated as such. Pampered would be maybe too strong a word because they’re rough and tough because it’s that kind of a race. However, all of them are given dry, warm straw at every checkpoint. If they get a little tired or something, there’s sixteen dogs you can only go as fast as your slowest dog. So what they’ll do is take the dog, put it in the sled basket in a lovely little zippered bag and then at the very next checkpoint, one of the 55 volunteer veterinarians will examine that dog and if the dog is just a little pooped out or some well they’ll send them back to Anchorage and everything’s fine. So they have premium care, without any exception within the sporting world, especially in the canine world. There is a false narrative out there with a group that claims to be animal rights representatives. They are not! These are the PETA people. And the way I put it is People Enthusiastically Terminating Animals because they want to kill the Iditarod and they’re experts at killing. There’s no question about it. The Virginia Department of Agriculture every month, every year indicates how many animals are taken in by PETA and what happens to them. To date since 1998, they have killed purposefully, many of them adoptable young animals, nearly 43,000. Let that one sink in for you. That is absolutely dreadful. They have no kennel facilities at their one and only location, the public is not invited. You can look at the Internet and type in PETA adoption hours, you won’t find any. They have a lot of guts to come after the Iditarod where the dogs are really respected and cared for and loved. Shame on them!
Jason:
Chuck has served as a spokesperson for Anchorage Alaska Dodge Jeep Ram for over 30 years. And the dealership has been a top sponsor for the Iditarod since 1980. Within a week of conducting this interview, however, Anchorage Dodge Jeep Ram pulled their sponsorship for the first time in decades. The pulling of this sponsorship occurred after PETA insistently targeted the parent company by sending over a quarter of a million emails, developing television ads and partaking in public protests across America. One of these protests even included the public destruction of a Chrysler minivan, while PETA members dressed in dog costumes beat the vehicle with mallet shouting [Protest Clip 1:00:02 – 1:00:11].
Organizations like PETA, have never been directly involved in the Iditarod, and unfortunately, many of their claims are contaminated with inaccuracies. The approach they have taken with Iditarod sponsors, however, has become so volatile in recent years, that some major organizations have been forced to retract their support. Rob Urbach, CEO of the Iditarod is no stranger to PETA, and their incredibly hostile approach to the race. As one of PETA’s he has experienced this aggression firsthand but has no intentions of submitting to their belligerents.
Rob:
They’re a formidable force and they use such misinformation out there. So spread the word that Iditarod people are people who really understand dog exercise physiology and got leadership in that field, more than any and they say, you know, God dogs are freezing to death and reality is the race course is too warm, that’s the biggest problem. So this is so much misinformation out there.
Jason:
In the modern age, misinformation runs rampant. Between social media, the internet and cable TV, it can be difficult to find the truth unless you experience it yourself.
Rob:
You can imagine getting a lot of calls, you never know, PETA I’m sure watches inside widescreen, 24 hours a day and tries to post stuff that they have no idea what they’re talking about, but they’ll post stuff they think the public will resonate with, and they do it. So anyway, we deal with it.
Jason:
A couple questions sort of leading back to the beginning of our conversation. Because we dealt with it a lot while we were there, it was a little shocking. What kind of impact do you feel like that these animal rights activists are having on the sport? And do you see the popularity of it declining or rising? Or where does it stand?
Rob:
Well, I guess, animal rights activists do put more attention on the sport. So from that standpoint, if people are smart enough to understand that their campaign is a campaign of misinformation, that has a massive distance with the truth, that is factually incorrect. The campaign, if you go on PETA’s website, it’ll say, gee, if an Iditarod dog is lucky enough to survive the race they’re crippled for life. Well, if that were true, then no dog would run the race twice. But the reality is that almost every dog all ready for set on the start line is the veteran dog, who has already run the race multiple times.
Jason:
The tension runs high between supporters of the Iditarod and animal rights activists such as PETA. Although PETA maintains that countless dogs die during the Iditarod, the reality is much different. While conducting our research for the episode, the world class care that these sled dogs receive year-round was made abundantly clear. This care extends to an even greater extent during the race itself, when veterinarians are checking dogs around the clock for days on end, and each team’s care is being heavily scrutinized to monitor. The narrative that PETA portrays to the public, however, seems to be a different story.
Rob:
And I think it’s an organization that has no moral compass, that in the two weeks the Iditarod dogs we’re talking about race ran, I mean, I don’t know how many dogs PETA killed int he kills mills that they own, and they basically don’t have any real efforts to run adoption service. But if you look at the records in the state of Virginia, they kill just, unfortunately, a high amount of the doctor’s dogs they take in for what they tell you is an adoption, but they’re generally killed within 24 hours. So it’s just a massive irony. And it’s just unfortunate because I think that I tried to engage them and say, hey, are you guys interested in animal welfare? Why don’t you do a research project with us? Why don’t you come to the Iditarod and see what it’s like to be in these kennels, to see what it’s like to have these dogs on the trail but they have shown no genuine interest in doing so.
Jason:
Yeah, the one that gets me is their whole argument that they’re forcing these dogs to run, DeeDee and I were talking about that when we had the opportunity to meet her. And I’m like, well, if you’re forcing these dogs to run so much, what do you need this big aluminum brake on the back of the sled?
Rob:
You know, what’s funny about that brake? So I’m watching these dogs coming in to Nome, and you know, we kind of have to grab the sled, put the brake on and the power, half the time [inaudible 1:05:13] and they have already run a thousand miles.
Jason:
How does somebody support the Iditarod? Because again, that’s our objective with this podcast. So I’d love for people to hear you kind of explain, as an individual, how do they support the Iditarod? And I know you guys have lost some sponsors. If there’s big companies out there listening or some other CEO of a big corporation, how would they sponsor/support the Iditarod?
Rob:
We’d love for them to reach out to us, but individuals, you can support us in a number of ways. You can be a member on our website, you can be a subscriber to Insider, certainly you can make a donation on our website. You can find me the CEO, Rob Urbach, I’m happy to engage anyone interested in supporting us. We do need support from our community. It’s a pretty expensive race, the way we do it, which is putting safety first. And we think that we have a very unique in that, it provides impact and meaning to a lot of people’s lives.
Jason:
The Iditarod doesn’t just provide meaning to the lives of its mushers, volunteers, communities and viewers; it has been a noteworthy supporter of the Make A Wish Foundation for years. Allowing children with a dream to do something that they may otherwise never have the opportunity to do. As a business or individual, it is possible to support the race itself or a musher of your choosing. With so many mushers competing in the Iditarod each year, how does one decide who to support?
DeeDee:
And if you are looking at a musher look for somebody who not only performance in the race, but lifestyle is something that you are proud of, that represents you. So I don’t know — because I remember telling several sponsors, I can’t ever guarantee you I could win. But I can guarantee you, you’ll never be embarrassed by my dog care. And that is a person whose quality of personality and their ethic with their animals is something that you can feel proud of. You could use that person 12 months a year in any kind of situation that you may want to include them in and always be proud of them and not have to be defensive of somebody else’s poor behavior.
Jason:
For nearly 50 years, the Iditarod has been changing lives, creating dreams, and celebrating the history, strength, and determination of the sled dog. The Iditarod dogs are a breed unlike any other. They are the peak of canine performance, and an image of what dogs are truly capable of when we prioritize their care, health, and training. They are the ultimate example of what is possible when humans allow dogs to utilize their God-given instinct. The last great race isn’t just any dog sporting event. As anyone who has ever had the opportunity to be a part of it will tell you.
DeeDee:
The way I describe it. It’s a celebration of the history of the Arctic and a partnership with dogs and man.
Jason:
I want to thank you for joining us for this episode on our journey to explore what truly makes an Iditarod sled dog. How these elite canine athletes are cared for by their mushers and vets, and ultimately what it takes to succeed when you’re at the peak of performance.
In our next episode, hear the experience of a rookie musher that competed in the last great race in a very unexpected way.
This episode was produced and edited by Jason Purgason, story by Stasia Dempster. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more great episodes. And be sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
The Iconic Race Of The North
Cast your mind back to March 2020 for a moment.
Across the world, only one topic is dominating the news cycle. The threat of a pandemic is looming larger with each passing day. A deadly virus – with the potential to drastically alter our long-held, cherished routines – is getting closer.
Yet in one corner of the globe, Covid-19 is not the center of attention. Far from it. Here, the air is crisp. The ground is laden with snow. And in this place, there is one long-held, cherished routine that will not be altered.
It’s March in Alaska, and that means one thing – the greatest sled dog race in the world is about to begin.
The Iditarod is here.
In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be releasing a series of episodes focused on the Iditarod. This iconic sled dog race takes place throughout Alaska each March, running from Anchorage to Nome. Mushers and their team of sled dogs battle challenging terrain, sub-zero temperatures and heavy blizzards in their attempts to reach the finish line in first place. Winners typically battle for eight to nine days in these hazardous conditions.
At A Life of Dogs, we were very fortunate to capture the magic of the Iditarod when we traveled to Alaska to cover the 2020 edition. It was an experience we will never forget – and we can’t wait to bring some amazing stories to you in our upcoming episodes.
Introducing the Iditarod
So, you may have heard about this famous sled dog race – but how much do you actually know about it?
In our first episode, you’ll learn a little about what makes this race so special.
Whether it’s the sheer amount of preparation it takes for mushers and their teams to succeed in this treacherous race, or the tradition of the ceremonial start in Anchorage, or to what some mushers describe as the almost spiritual experience of traveling out on the race route with a pack of sled dogs – there are so many interesting stories surrounding the Iditarod.
Musher interviews
Riding through the harsh Alaskan landscape with a pack of sled dogs isn’t for the faint of heart. As you may imagine, it takes a special type of person to compete in the Iditarod.
Even with this undisputed bravery, many mushers have to scratch from the race before its completion for a variety of reasons. Mushers may be forced to drop out if they sustain an injury or their sled becomes damaged beyond repair.
In the coming weeks, you’ll hear from some of the most famous names in the mushing world. They include the likes of Martin Buser, a four-time Iditarod champion originally from Switzerland. In our inaugural episode of this series, Buser offers an overview into the origins of the Iditarod.
In addition, we’ll be bringing you the unique stories behind many of the competitors in this year’s race – from seasoned veterans to rookies embarking on their maiden Iditarod voyage.
The importance of the Iditarod to Alaska
The event begins on the first Saturday in March with a ceremonial start in Anchorage. Mushers and their sled dog teams ride through the center of the city to the acclaim and cheers of locals, sled dog enthusiasts and visitors (and podcast crews!). This opening ceremony is a relaxed affair and a rare opportunity for the mushers to interact with spectators. The following day, the race is restarted at Willow Lake – and this is when the competitive aspect of the race kicks in.
The Iditarod holds an incredible amount of significance to the state of Alaska. Due to the climate and terrain, mushing and sled dogs have been a large part of Alaskan life throughout the state’s history. The Iditarod is seen as a vital link to the heritage of the state.
Sled dogs
Of course, the real stars of the show are the teams of sled dogs who lead their mushers through the Iditarod Trail. These dogs possess a unique mix of strength, speed and endurance, with an unwavering desire to run.
Many of the modern day dogs competing in the Iditarod are mixed-breed huskies, weighing approximately 45 to 55 pounds. A team consists of a maximum of 14 dogs.
As you’ll discover in future episodes, one contentious aspect of the Iditarod is the welfare and treatment of the dogs involved. On one side, PETA and other animal rights groups allege that the race is cruel; on the other side, mushers and fans of the Iditarod maintain that the event harnesses the natural, inherent abilities of these dogs. The Iditarod Trail Committee has stringent checks in place to monitor the health of every dog participating.
Look out for upcoming episodes!
This introductory episode is just the beginning of our coverage of Iditarod 2020. Remember to subscribe to A Life of Dogs wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss the next one!
Podcast Transcript
Click ‘Show transcript’ below to read the transcript from this episode of A Life of Dogs.
A Life of Dogs Podcast – Season Two, Episode Four (S2, E4)
Episode Name: The Iconic Race of the North
Host
Jason Purgason
Guests
Various
Duration
44:06 minutes
Broadcast Date
October 19, 2020
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Man: It’s hard not to be a fan of the race if you really think about it and understand how it has evolved and how it has sustained itself and what kind of people are engaged. So you felt it yourself up in this community. I’m really honored to be part of it.
Woman: I recall one of those checkpoints three o’clock, four o’clock in the morning, I don’t know, and checking dogs and clear sky, full moon, and one of the dogs starts howling and then all the dogs start howling. That’s pretty cool.
Man 2: This is when the Corona virus was starting to pick up and we have no idea that that was going on in the rest of the world, and your emotional state is so up and down because you’re on limited sleep and it’s cold and you’re racing and you’re tired.
Man: And it was kind of a similar fashion to how I ran the Iditarod. I found out I was going to run the race one week before I ran it.
Woman: The freedom of just you and dogs traveling through unmarked territory is such almost a spiritual feeling. And I guess I say spiritual feeling because I think it’s a God-given gift to be able to do so. I mean, how many people even could dream of doing that, much less have that opportunity for years. I just feel so blessed, and part of it is I have such great respect for the people of Alaska and you talk about a difficult environment to come into and to pursue your dreams in. This is a difficult environment, and yet together with dogs, they accomplished an amazing amount and I feel like I am involved in living history when I get to share that.
It’s early March in Anchorage and its bitter cold. Not record-breaking cold, but still well below freezing and snowy. Planes are busy overhead and the city is bustling with traffic. There’s an energy in the air that is as prevalent as the cold, biting wind. Something quite remarkable is about to happen on a scale that no one can really yet understand. From a life of dogs, I’m Jason Purgason, and this is the iconic race of the North.
Martin: The sled dog sport is what I call a 9,000-year evolution of co-habiting this earth with sled dogs. National Geographic just concluded the carbon dating on some digs, archeological digs in which they prove that sled dogs had been deliberately bred for performance 9,000 years ago. Now we’re not talking domestication. We’re not talking just having the ore wolf become a family member. We’re talking what they described as deliberate sled dog breeding, meaning the nomadic or semi-nomadic people of the Siberian peninsulas; they deliberately bred dogs for their cohabitation, meaning those dogs pulled sledges. The sledges were big and loaded with their earthly belongings. They were not yet riding the sleds because evidence shows that the runners were upturned on both sides of the sled, ergo you couldn’t just ride on it unless you were sitting on it, which is possible.
Freighting then started to give way to the survival dogs, meaning people were more sedentary and supplies needed to be delivered to the outposts as far as your imagination. All that, of course, in the Arctic and the difference between horses who only have been utilized for 6,000 years, they have excelled in the warmer climates, whereas dogs because of their physiology have surpassed anything else in the Arctic climate and not being able to perspire is one of the main reasons they have evolved like that. After the freighting millennia, literally hundreds of years of freighting supplies into the most remote places, then of course the gold miners were a little bored in the winter time because the ground is frozen. You can’t do a lot of digging in the ground when the ground is frozen so they started to have dog races to pass the time. Not only driving races, but betting on races and so it became a pastime of the North to follow the greatest dog drivers and the greatest dogs, and that’s where we are now. We just simply have taken that sport of the early 20th century and beyond. We have taken that sport and selectively bred and helped evolution to a super dog that we now simply lump together on the term of Alaskan Husky. Most of your listeners might be familiar with the Siberian Huskies, which is a pure breed. They are the dogs that would be representing the 1920s. They were often direct imports from the Russian peninsula, ergo the Siberian name. The Siberian Huskies were typecast as a pure breed, and because of that, they still have to look like the 1920s.
A good example for your listeners would be in the same era, the Model-T Ford happened to be the fastest car. Nobody made a standard for automobiles that’s how they have to look or drive, whereas any dog breed that gets typecast has to stagnate because you’re no longer letting evolution evolve. You’re stagnating, you’re stopping the evolution. And if the clock is your judge, you don’t care whether you’re brown, black, white, or polka-dotted, and that’s where the Alaskan Huskies are. A term I use a lot to describe my dogs because it’s hard for people to look at them and say, well, what are these dogs? I often say, they are like a term you probably know – Americans. And then people look at you and say, yeah. Of course, we don’t care whether you’re black or white or polka dot. What matters is the intrinsic values, your physiological makeup, your morphology, the way you move down the trail, way, way more important than whether you have blonde hair or polka-dotted hair. So that gives people a bit of an idea of what the Alaskan Huskies, which is 99% of all the competitive teams are made up of those dogs. That’s what those dogs are.
Jason: That’s Martin Buser, a legend in the dog mushing world and 4-time Iditarod champion. Martin came from Switzerland and has run 36 Iditarod’s. During our time in Alaska, we had the opportunity to get to know more about Martin and we’ll share more about him later. Each year on the first Saturday of March, an amazing event takes place starting in Anchorage. Many of you know it as the Iditarod Sled Dog Race. We had the fortune of covering the 2020 Iditarod and it was truly an experience like no other. This event and all it entails is indescribable. However, over the next few episodes, I’m going to try to bring you the story of the race, but first we’ll need to rewind several months and learn more about the people who compete in this more than 1000-mile journey, and what it takes to prepare for such an endeavor. We start with Wade Marrs, a 10-time competitor, top-5 finisher and the owner of Stump Jumpin’ Kennels.
Wade: Well, my mom and uncle used to train dogs with me strapped on the wheelers with a car seat, and then mushing. Ran my first two-dog race when I was 5 years old and running few dogs since I was probably 4 years old. I got my first race dogs when I was about 10 years old. I ran my first race on my own was the Goose Bay 120 and the junior Iditarod in 2007. The name Stump Jumpin’ Kennel didn’t come to fruition until probably around 2010, 2012 but the kennel has been building ever since about 2007. I’ve ran the Iditarod 9 times now. My first one was in 2009. I was 18 years old. Ran it as early as possible and I took a couple of years off after my first one and started back in 2012 and have ran every race since 2012.
Anna: My name is Anna Berington and my twin sister and I, Kristy we grew up in Northern Wisconsin, probably about as far north in Wisconsin as you can get. We had pet dogs and cows and horses and chickens and things just on a farm growing up, and our neighbor had sled dogs. So that was our first experience with sled dogs and we’d been fans of Gary Paulson’s books and Disney movies and things like that and the outdoors. So that’s how we first got our feet wet, I guess, with sled dogs being able to run and work with our neighbor who had sprint racing dogs, which was quite a bit different than what we do now.
Kristy: This is Kristy. I first moved up here in 2007 to kind of scout it out and then shortly after that, we both moved up here. When we were kids, we were involved in it as much as we could be, and when we graduated, we both joined the Army National Guard and did some school and took a small break from it, but felt that yearning to go back to it. And after our commitments with school and the military, we found ourselves in California working at a Sundog tour place, which eventually brought us to Alaska to look for dogs to purchase for that touring outfit. And we met Iditarod Campion Dean Osmar and he was looking for a kennel help. They’re called handlers when you work for a kennel doing basic chores and exercising the dogs, so he offered us a job right then and there and we’ve been up here ever since. At the time, we were living in a tent in the Sierra Nevada mountains, so we packed everything up on our backs and have called Alaska home ever since. Got a one-way ticket.
Anna: This is Anna. I’ve run 8 Iditarods and Christie has run 10 Iditarods, and then she’s also done the Yukon Quest, which is another 1000-mile race that gets started February 1st, but we’re not in that one this year, but it’s in the back of our minds for the upcoming next season.
Jason: That was Kristy and Anna Berington, identical twin sisters who own Seeing Double Sled Dog Racing, a kennel with over 50 dogs. Kristy has been running the Iditarod since 2010 and Anna since 2012. Up next, we hear from Kaci Murringer, a native of Michigan and one of several 2020 rookie Iditarod mushers that we spoke with.
Kaci: Where I grew up in Michigan, they have a dog sled race called the UP 200, and the trail goes right behind my old house where I grew up in when I was a kid. Always loved dogs, always love winter. And one year I just said, Mom, Dad, this looks fun. And they found a musher in the area and I went and tried it out. Did my first race when I was 7 years old. Two-dog, I think it was like a mile or so; a little fun race. And the guy said, all right Kaci, what you have got to know is don’t let go of the dog sled, and I thought, well, why would that be an issue? I’ll stand up straight and sure enough, flipped over and got dragged for about half of it and never let go. And the guy came out, got me right-side up said, good job and I went on to finish the race. Come a long way since then.
Jason: So you did half the race flipped over?
Kaci: I think so, yeah. Or at least pretty close to that. I couldn’t quite figure out how to use my feet to pop up, but we’re good now if that happened. And then two years later, I got my kennel started with my first few sled dogs and took off from there. And now 20 years later, I believe we’re up here signed up for our rookie Iditarod, so it was good to finally be coming full circle.
Jason: This annual race, often termed the Super Bowl of Alaska, requires an enormous amount of training and preparation. For many mushers, the work to prepare for next year’s race begins as soon as this year’s race is over. Here’s Wade Marrs again.
Wade: Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of work. So we’ll probably the biggest work dubs are the training of the dogs obviously. We’ll train them between 20 and 100 miles a day. They’ll put on about 2000 to 3000 miles of training runs before the race ever starts. And then also starting the food drops for the race itself. We’ll send out about 2000 pounds of cut up meat and kibble and stuff like that for the dogs to eat along the trail so that’s a lot of work too. I almost immediately put in my order for the booties. Dogs all wear booties on their feet. We’ll send about 3000 booties out on the trail for the dogs to use, so we’ll order those up right away and get those matched together and bagged and ready for next year and try to get done as far ahead as possible so when training season comes, we can focus solely on training as much as possible.
Anna: Oh yeah, there’s about 20 checkpoints along the trail that we’ll send gear to, and you send out about anywhere between 2,000 to 2,500 pounds of stuff to the checkpoints, and the stuff is dog food – a lot of dog food – dog booties, runner plastic, extra socks and gloves for the people, people food, more dog food, gloves, socks, batteries, other gear for the dogs. We send out dog blankets and the dogs will wear; besides the booties, they wear coats. They have the little powder skirt for the coat. They have these sleeves that they sometimes wear and we send out massage liniments and so it’s all those things. That stuff is sent out about two weeks before the race starts, so you have to have somewhat of a plan of where you want these things, and certain parts of the race have a reputation of being extra cold, extra bad weather or things like that, and you know there’s certain long runs that you need to prepare for where you’re going to camp out, where you’re going to want to extra, extra things. So you sit down and you plan all that out and leading up to it is a lot of meat cutting. We cut a lot of meat. So we buy all our meat in about 50 pounds blocks, and we cut that into small pieces about the size of a loaf of bread. I compare everything to people food. A slice of bread and the snacks are about the size of a Snickers bar. Just different kinds of meat. We send out fish, beef fat, beef, chicken, tripe, horse, lamb, lots of chicken skin, beaver, lots of different food.
Wade: I do scheduling for the race so I can stick to the schedule on the trail and training and stuff. So I’ll start writing that as soon as I finish the Iditarod while it’s still fresh in my brain. I’ll jot down a schedule for the next year’s race while I’m remembering all the different things that I thought of out on the trail. Usually we replace our sled every year and get that ready, so we have to build a new sled.
Kaci: Yeah. I literally just bought all the pieces today when I was in town so we’re going to start building that here this evening and get it ready for Iditarod. Basically, going to model his exact sled design, and actually do a race with it. It was awesome. Handled really nicely so I had to buy the sled runners from a specialty store up in Fairbanks, Alaska that sells them. And then I went to a welding place and bought aluminum stanchions and the framework for my sled. And then I had to go to a plastics place to get things like the handlebar and the brush bow and the sled basket bottom that I am going to put my gear on top of that will support it. A few different places, but thankfully Matthew’s a handy man. We’re going to pretty much custom build all of our parts and pieces to save a lot of money because typically a sled, if you were going to buy it outright, it’s usually around $3,000 up to $6,000 sometimes, but we’re probably going to build mine for $1,000, maybe $1,500.
Anna: Oh yeah. We did build our sleds and have been maintaining them since. Sometimes we’ll get a little help from the flood builders around here to update some things, but when you build your sled, it’s a lot easier to fix it if you bust it out on the trail, so that’s good knowledge to have and we have to build all our dog houses. We mix liniments and massage oils for the dogs, so those are the things we make. We’ve made special treats for the dogs before and my mother-in-law can sew anything, so she’s really great about doing stuff for our dog coats and the sled bags and the sleeves and everything else that the dog wears. But we do order all our booties from our favorite local mushing supplies store that has them because we use so many. It just takes so long for an individual to make 4,000 booties, and that’s just for Iditarod. We do a lot of middle-distance races and training that we use booties in. We wash them and reuse them, but they eventually wear out.
Jason: In addition to preparing food, equipment and supplies for the race, it’s important to keep in mind that there’s lots of work that goes into training and caring for the top athletes that will actually move the sled. Teams also have other hurdles to conquer before entering the Iditarod. We’ll learn about all this and more when we return, so stay with us.
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Martin: Because we know the involvement, the commitment, the year round daily, not only time and financial-wise, but lifestyle wise commitment that it takes, we’re very, very cautious in not having people fall into that lightly because it’s such a huge commitment. Anytime you work with living things, you have to be there all the time. Then if we cannot talk them out of it, of course I do my absolute best to be a good teacher, a good mentor, a good coach.
Matthew: It’s kind of a weird role reversal. I never really thought that I would be a mentor, so it’s flattering to have if she called me that because my buddy Martin Buser who is like the Dale Earnhardt of our sport up here is Martin Buser. He’s a four-time champion. He’s in the Hall of Fame and he taught me and now I’m at a point where I can take his teachings and then pass them on to the next generation, which is kind of cool. She’s an awesome dog musher. She’s very patient with them, very loving with them. She is a hard, hard worker. I’ve never heard her complain once. She has never asked for a day off. I mean, if you own a business, that’s the type of employee you want. Someone who’s ready to go to work every day and this is what she loves to do and she’s been dreaming of it since she was little, so I’m really happy to be able to provide her the dogs to go down the trail.
Kaci: It might sound like a common-sense thing, but we’re always just saying go have fun. If things get rough, don’t let it get you down. Just look at your dogs and how amazing they are, and just keep moving on.
Jason: This commitment, and more importantly this positive attitude, is vital to making it through the Iditarod. A lot of work goes into raising and training these extreme canine athletes. We return to Wade to give us an idea of what this is like.
Wade: The dogs we use are called the Alaskan Huskies, which are just a fancy word for a mutt. They’re just mixed bred dogs. Back in the day, they took the more tough fluffy Siberian type of dog that is built for the outdoor elements and they mixed those with different kinds of hounds like Greyhound, Wilkies, Pointers, dogs like this. And eventually it came down to a nice, even breed between them to where we have the high energy and high attitude of the hound, but we still have the toughness and the endurance of the Husky so they can handle the outdoor conditions and they can travel much faster. Some people today still use the traditional purebred Siberian dogs. Those guys are usually three to four days slower than the Alaskan Huskies, so the mixed breeds came out a lot better. They have great health and longevity. So they’ll start training for their first time at 6 months old. That’s only about half mile to a mile run at a time. With some older dogs, they’ll start coming into shorter races, 150, 200-mile races as yearlings – year and a half old. Two-year olds, they’re very solid for middle distance racing. Every once in a while, but rarely a two-year-old will make the race team for the Iditarod. We try to start them mostly in the competitive side of things at three years old, because that’s when they’re more fully developed physically, and then they retire usually between 8 and 12 years old, which is a pretty long working life for the dogs. On average, they live till about 17 years, I would say.
Anna: We have 40 dogs that are in training and some of those are our younger dogs that are essentially trying out for the team and experiencing all their first races and just getting a grasp. They’re like a freshman/JV dog, but they’re also our bench warmers in case of somebody who’s ill or a female comes into heat and causes a huge distraction on the team. We opt to leave those ones at home in a case like that, so they’re training for it, but definitely not on the dream team yet. Next year they will be prime time. It’ll be exciting to put those guys on the varsity teams. When it comes down to picking each of us our top 14 dogs, that’s going to be hard to only pick 14 because we’ve got a lot of really nice dogs to work with.
Jason: Yeah. That was my next question. How hard is it to get it down to the 14, and when is the final decision made? How do you approach that?
Anna: It’s a slow process, but Iditarod has a lot of qualifications for the dogs to even run the race. The first thing they go through is blood work and an EKG so you can submit 24 dogs for that whole process. And then a week after that, you have to submit 20 dogs for a physical health check so they force you to slowly whittle that number down.
Wade: I guess the process starts as puppies and the number one thing with puppies is socialization, making sure that the puppies love interacting with people and are good interacting with people and interacting with other dogs and stuff like that. So that’s where our process begins and those two things are very important. We’ll have veterinarians on the trail and volunteers and stuff that they’re gonna be interacting with constantly. A lot of the kids from the villages come running out to say hi to the dogs, so that’s the number one thing that we look for in the dogs early on is just human and other dog interactions. And then as they get older and start running on the team, next attribute that we look for is attitude. Attitudes are very important for ones that just want to do it and love to do it. Very rarely these days, but every once in a while, we’ll find one that just is not interested in running, and usually those guys become a house potato somewhere or a couch potato somewhere. But most of the dogs these days just absolutely thrive on running in the team so that’s the next thing we look for as we’re training them as young dogs is just their attitude and their love for doing it. As they get older and start leaning towards making the race team, a little bit more comes into play. Athleticism – the dogs have to be able to run at high speeds, 17 to 20 miles an hour, and then they have to be able to continuously move smoothly at 10, 11 miles an hour for long, long distances, and so we look for that kind of thing with the athleticism and the endurance on the dogs.
Appetite is a huge thing for our team because on the race they’re eating 10,000 to 12,000 calories a day, so they have to just really love to eat and put food down very quickly, and so those are some of the things we look for. Obviously make sure that the dogs are hardy and built well, have a smooth gait. That way they don’t get sore wrists or anything like that. If the dogs are getting sore, then they maybe can’t handle the speeds we are going or something like that. So if the dog doesn’t fit into the race team from the B team and usually they’re just a little bit different style than what we prefer in our team, a lot of us mushers will sell or trade each other dogs that might fit better with their team versus our team, and that works out really good because the dogs still get to do what they love. And they get to a place where they fit in good and are going to perform well and excel.
So that’s kind of the processes going through from puppies into race team, and then once they’re ready to finish with the race team, you can kind of tell by both their attitudes again and their eating habits and also their performance on the trail. So if they’re starting to slow down a little bit on the runs, then obviously they may be getting a little bit too old to keep up with the pace, or if they’re stopping eating, then maybe they’re getting too much exercise and it’s taking their interest off of food, or obviously if they’re acting pouty or sad that they have to run, then maybe it’s a little bit past their time or something along those lines. You can see it in the dogs’ very well that they’re ready to end their career or be done running, but you can tell when they’re ready to go to. Some of the old dogs, their attitude never changes, but you can see it in the performance.
Wade: There are 18 of them that are training on my main race team, and most likely I’ll start with 14 of those 18. And then we have about 14 that are training on a B-team and most of those guys are one and two-year olds and a couple of older dogs that don’t need the harder training as a race team does. So a couple of those older dogs might come back into the team for Iditarod, but we have a second driver this year who’s training up that second team and he’ll be running them in a couple middle distance races getting qualified for Iditarod next year. We start pretty late in August. We start just kind of like you would as a human athlete. We start very lightly in August with like 3 mile runs and stuff like that, and slowly build them up with 5 and 10 until eventually we’re training between 20 and 100 miles a day. In training, we’ll do camp outs 200, 300-mile camp outs and kind of simulate our race and stuff like that through those camps. In the summertime when their time off is, we give them between a month and two of just relaxation and recovery time to make sure that they all come back 100 percent from anything, and then we start free running them loose and running them in the swamps and playing in the marsh. They love running down in the water and cooling off on hot summer days, so we’ll do a lot of that kind of training with them in the off season.
Jason: As I found out, entering the Iditarod Sled Dog Race is far more involved than just signing up and showing up on the day with a team of dogs. Each participant must run a number of shorter races prior to the Iditarod in order to qualify for the race.
Anna: Yeah as a start, 750 racing miles, so they ask you to do two 300-mile races, at least that distance. So, for me that was the Copper Basin 300 and the Kobuk 440 race, and you need to have one race of at least 150 miles so I did the Goose Bay 150. But not only do you have to finish all those races, you have to have race judge and race ushering approval saying that, yes, you rode on a trail and you were able to take care of your dog and yourself out there in the wilderness of Alaska, just to make sure when you get on the actual Iditarod trail, you’re prepared and you know what you’re doing out there. So, it is a process, but they do it for very good reason.
Wade: So before you run the Iditarod for your first time, you have to qualify and you have to run 750 miles of qualifying races, so two 300 mile races and 150 mile race or 200, and those races take place anywhere from December to April all over the state. There’s quite a few of them in the lower 48 and in Canada as well that people use for qualifiers. Once you run the Iditarod, you’re permanently qualified once you finish unless there’s a special committee that can review you and say you need to requalify under certain conditions. But once you’re competing in and finishing the Iditarod, you’re permanently qualified, but each year we will compete in other races sometimes for purse money and sometimes just for fun, and the dogs enjoy getting around other teams and going to new places so we’ll sign up for a couple other races every year, just for those experiences.
Jason: I had the fortune to spend months getting to know more about what the Iditarod Sled Dog Race was all about. From the mushers to the dogs, all the volunteers and everyone else that makes this event happen, it truly is a massive undertaking. One odd fact that demonstrates this is that crews often spend an incredible amount of time hauling in dump truck loads of snow to cover 4th Avenue and the other streets of Anchorage to ensure that the ceremonial start takes place.
Kaci: Nope, that’s real. They’ll haul dump truckloads of snow a few days before the race or they’re making it so we can run through downtown Anchorage and other year when it was such low snow, they had it hauled in by rail car from Fairbanks because they needed to do some sort of ceremonial start here in Anchorage. That’s one of their preparations for Saturday, that day is to get something for us to run on in town. Like where we live, there’s more sled dogs than people, and we don’t have Super Bowl or professional teams for anything so it gives people in the state something to follow and rally around and it’s a really fun time of year. The frivolity that happens with the sprint racing and Iditarod, it’s just a great time. There’s so many races up here to do that you can travel from where we’re at within 360 miles, you can get to almost every single race that Alaska holds, and then if you’re in the Midwest, if you want to go all the way out to Montana or to Colorado or any place like that that has a race, it seems like more of a trek and there are just so many other mushers around here that it is a community and it has a very historic hold out here that there’s a lot of old timers that can tell you how it was and they will help you out with things and see all these trails and places. It feels like the place to be if you want to professionally pursue dog mushing.
Jason: It’s the Super Bowl of Alaska.
Anna: It is, yeah.
Jason: This race is a spectacular event to experience, even as a spectator. As a competitor, even more so. Kaci, the rookie explains, and she also expresses her desire to become part of an elite club.
Kaci: Yeah. Every rookie musher that finishes Iditarod, they give you a belt buckle and you become part of the Iditarod Finishers club. It’s a pretty elite club. There are actually more people that have been the top of Mount Everest than have finished this Sled Dog Race, so I’m looking forward to being a part of that as well.
Jason: Being a musher and competing in the Iditarod is incredibly time consuming, expensive and demanding. What has been covered in this episode is only a fraction of the work and commitment it takes. So, some may ask why do they do it? The answer is pretty simple, actually. It’s for the love of the dogs and to continue to allow these dogs to do what they love. When the Iditarod is mentioned, most people immediately conjure up images of Balto or Togo, and think of the serum run that saved the people of Nome in 1925. But as Kaci explains, the race has more to do with Joe Redington, Senior and a commitment to save the Alaskan sled dog.
Kaci: And then we get a lot of misconceptions too about Iditarod and the connection to the serum and people always go, why didn’t you talk about that? What about Balto and all this? The Iditarod was not actually created for that reason. A guy by the name of Joe Redington, Senior, he’s the father of the Iditarod is what they called him. He noticed back in the 1960s that the machines, the snow machines were actually replacing the sled dogs up here for transportation. He didn’t like the thought of that at all, so he came up with the Iditarod Sled Dog Race to keep those sled dogs around and keep that traditional alive up here in Alaska. Today, actually dogsledding is the official state sport up here so the Iditarod while it does cover part of that serum trail from Ruby to Nome, it wasn’t actually created to commemorate that run at all.
Jason: I want to thank you for joining us for our first episode covering the Iditarod Sled Dog Race and how that you’ll subscribe to hear our upcoming episodes that guarantee to deliver some spectacular stories from the trail.
Marcus: They want to kill the Iditarod and they’re experts at killing. There’s no question about it.
Jason: In our next episode, learn about the controversy surrounding the race and what it takes to care for these special canine athletes. Until then, we leave you with Redington’s Run by Hobo Jim Varsos.
[Hobo Jim Varsos singing Redington’s Run; 41:42 to 44:00]
A Climate for Change
A Climate For Change: How Conservation Detection Dogs Are Saving Species Around The World
As saddening as it sounds, it is estimated that 150 to 200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct during the course of one day on our planet. Climate change, loss of habitat and other factors continue to put more species at significant risk of being completely wiped out.
Many of these animals play a critical role in maintaining the natural balance of our planet’s ecosystem. Without them, our way of daily life would be completely different, from the air that we breathe to the food that we consume.
This episode explores the fascinating stories behind three special people who are determined to make a difference. Each of them uses the amazing capabilities of dogs to help preserve our natural environment and protect endangered or at-risk species.
Jacqueline Staab & Darwin, the Bumblebee Detection Dog
Jacqueline Staab is a 28-year-old grad student from Appalachian State University. Jacqueline owns a German Shorthaired Pointer, Darwin, who has been trained to detect bumblebee nests.
The Alpine bumblebee is particularly important. These bees all live above 11,000 ft, with changeable weather and unusual conditions for bees to survive. As one of the few pollinators who live at such a high altitude, their importance cannot be understated – they have developed such close relationships with flowers for pollination.
Staab acquired Darwin when he was a puppy – on a mission to train him to be the first Alpine bumblebee detection dog in the western hemisphere. With bumblebee populations in decline – some research suggests they have dropped almost 30% in a generation – their work is more important now than ever.
During this episode, Staab describes her journey with Darwin, and how their amazing work will help to preserve the Alpine bumblebee for generations to come.
Christian Fritz & K9s 4 Conservation, protecting sea turtles
Christian Fritz is a military veteran, who founded a non-profit – K9s 4 Conservation – on the coast of Texas, focused on saving sea turtle populations.
Six of the seven sea turtle species are classified as threatened or endangered. Despite living on Earth since the age of the dinosaurs – over 110 million years ago – sea turtles are at risk due to a variety of factors. Although other animals such as raccoons and seabirds can feed on sea turtles, and climatic changes pose a threat, human interference from plastic contamination and poachers is an even greater danger.
With his dogs certified for search and rescue, Fritz and his working dogs scour the sand for any indication of Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles. Using sand from the sea turtle nests, Fritz can train his dogs to detect the scent of the nests.
The second part of this episode focuses on the fascinating and rewarding work Fritz and his dogs undertake to help preserve sea turtles.
Dr. Romane Cristescu & Detection Dogs for Conservation, protecting koalas
Dr. Romane Cristescu co-founded Detection Dogs for Conservation to help protect one of the most prominent symbols of Australia – the koala.
Koalas made the news recently during the scenes from the terrifying bushfire crisis in Australia. Even prior to this situation, koalas were struggling. The Australian Koala Foundation estimates there are anywhere between 43,000 and 100,000 koalas left in the wild.
Dr. Cristescu and her team are passionate about protecting the koala. She pioneered the use of dogs to locate koalas through scat. Her team looks for energetic, playful dogs – and harnesses their natural working qualities of canines to learn more about koala populations and habitats.
The final part of this episode of A Life of Dogs highlights the amazing work of Dr. Cristescu and Bear, as they try to help preserve the koala population through Australia.
We wish to thank everyone who was interviewed and shared their story in this episode.
You can find out more about Darwin the Bee Dog on his Facebook page.
You can learn more about Christian Fritz and K9s 4 Conservation at their website.
For more information about Dr. Romane Cristescu and Detection Dogs for Conservation, visit their section on the USC website.
We also want to thank our episode sponsors. Be sure to visit them to learn more and show them your support. Without their continued support our podcast wouldn’t be possible.
Royal Canin
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Highland Canine Training, LLC
Podcast Transcript
Click ‘Show transcript’ below to read the transcript from this episode of A Life of Dogs.
A Life of Dogs Podcast – Season Two, Episode Three (S2, E3)
Episode Name: A Climate for Change
Host
Jason Purgason
Guests
Jacqueline Staab; Christian Fritz; Dr. Romane Cristescu
Duration
57:01 minutes
Broadcast Date
February 19, 2020
Jason: Support for A Life of Dogs is brought to you by Royal Canin. Royal Canin offers precise, effective nutrition for dogs based on size, age, breed, and to address specific needs. To learn more about Royal Canin, visit them on the web at royalcanin.com and by Highland Canine Training, offering professional dog training solutions and premier canine education. Learn more at highlandcanine.com.
I’m Jason Purgason and you’re listening to A Life of Dogs, the podcast that explores our life with man’s best friend and the amazing ways that we work and live together. You’re listening to Episode three of our second season. If this is your first time listening, be sure to check out our other episodes in our first and second seasons to hear some pretty amazing tales.
Across the globe, it’s estimated that between 150 and 200 species of plant, insect, bird, and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. In this episode, we discover the stories of some special people who are determined to save some interesting animals with the help of well-trained dogs. Many of these animals play a critical role in our ecosystem.
Jacqueline: Some plants can only be pollinated exclusively by bumblebees, a thing called buzz pollination where they vibrate at the perfect frequency for the plant to release its pollen. It’s actually a really cool evolutionary thing they got going on with some plants.
Jason: In 2017, the US Fish and Wildlife Service added the rusty patched bumblebee to the list of endangered species. Due to loss of habitat, diseases, climate change, pesticides and parasites, bumblebee populations have dropped almost 90% in the last 20 years. Considering the fact that every third bite of food that we eat is attributed to pollinators, this is clearly a dire situation.
Jacqueline: Basically, Alpine bumblebees are some of the only pollinators in the Alpine area, so they’re like a Keystone species, so without them like basically … a Keystone species means that a lot of ecological functions and stuff kind of rely on something that that species does. Like sharks are a Keystone species in the ocean and so without these Keystone pollinators, the Alpine ecosystem is completely going to change.
Jason: This episode begins with Jacqueline Staab, a 28-year-old grad student from Appalachian State University who’s paired up with a young German short haired pointer to help save the Alpine bumblebee.
Jacqueline: So the Alpine is kind of like a canary in a coal mine for climate change. Things that are happening up there. It’s happening drastically, like really quickly and over the past 10 years, the number of bumblebee species in that area have gone from two to three to five to seven. And obviously – well, you don’t know this – but bumblebees are limited. Their populations are limited by the number of nest sites and we know bumblebees can’t dig their own holes. So they live in abandoned mammal burrows, which is where Darwin comes in. But since they only have a limited number of resources and all these species are moving up in elevation, are able now to move up in elevation, they’re competing for those resources. And this could drive certain species to extinction, and change ranges, change populations. So it’s really important that we need to know that. Also, a lot of bumblebee nesting, ecology and biology information. getting that information has been hampered due to the inability to find bumblebee nests, so the only two ways I did a literature search and the only two ways, three ways I found. So the first way was to just systematically search yourself, which I did one summer.
Jason: Visually and just looking for them?
Jacqueline: Yeah. And I literally spent hours and hours and hours looking one summer and I found three nests, and I was out there five days a week looking for nests.
Jason: Pinpointing bumblebee nests can be incredibly difficult. They can consist of a tiny hole buried in the grass, recognized by a single bee going in or out every few minutes. To improve efficiency and finding these elusive sites, other strategies have to be used.
Jacqueline: So I looked into other ways, and there have been other successful people had used volunteers where they all kind of like walk next to each other in a line and look for it, but if you’re in the Alpine environment of Colorado, that’s not safe. First of all, you’re in Park County. You’re not going to find that many volunteers that are going to stop mining or whatever they’re doing day to day to go and help you find bumblebees. There just aren’t that many people and they’re all busy working. It’s not like a college/university town where you can just find all kinds of volunteers, so that wasn’t going to happen. Plus, the terrain’s a little bit dangerous to have a bunch of inexperienced hikers. They’re long days, long miles, and so we had to find another way and so I ran across this paper in my research, Waters 2011 out of Great Britain and they actually had the British army train a dog for conservation, for bumblebee conservation to find bumblebee nests.
So it was a two year old Springer spaniel that they found and they trained him up to do it and they tested him, tested the efficacy and stuff, and he did great. He found all five nests in a 250 by 50 square meter plot. They had five different species. So they found the cues they used to find bumblebee nests are the same across species. So they’re able to find, like Darwin has found in his training, he’s been able to find nests in wax from [unclear audio] and he’s able to find them from different species, which is really important and what we need. So that’s really great.
Jason: So at this point you may be asking yourself, what makes someone want to go out search for bumblebees that are known by most people for their painful stings?
Jacqueline: First of all, they’re not scary at all. They’re actually really cool and fuzzy and cute. Like if you’re a dog person, you could totally be a bee person cause they’re fuzzy and wonderful. They won’t just sting you for no reason. I’ve only been stung twice – once because I exploded a paint pen on one of them and the other one was actually under turgor, which means it was frozen. Basically, they go to sleep when they’re really cold. So I was handling it and I basically stung myself and I handle these guys all the time. So they’re actually really great.
Jason: There are currently over 250 species of bumblebee. So what makes Jacqueline so interested in the Alpine bumblebee?
Jacqueline: Alpine bumblebees specifically, they are different because they all live above 11,000 feet, which is really high. You know there’s a lot of spatial heterogeneity and just from place to place, it’s windy, the weather changes all the time. It’s really hard for bees to live up there so these bees have certain adaptations that have allowed them to live up there. And so since they’ve been up there by themselves with the flowers for such a long time, they’ve developed really close relationships with these flowers as far as pollination goes. So they have longer tongues. So flowers that require bees with longer tongues for pollination maybe won’t get pollinated or could go extinct so that’s really important. Basically, Alpine bumblebees are some of the only pollinators in the Alpine area. So, they’re a Keystone species.
Jason: In order to adequately survey the Alpine bumblebee, researchers are required to locate their nesting sites. These nesting sites are becoming more sparse, which creates some pretty interesting behavior from the bees.
Jacqueline: Basically, they live in abandoned mammal burrows because they can’t dig their own nest, but it’s like a big fight. In the spring when the Queens are competing, they’ll actually stab each other over nesting sites and try to circle one another, kind of like Game of Thrones. But the bees – they do! It’s pretty intense.
Jason: I first met Jacqueline at our facility in North Carolina, where she brought this lanky German short-haired pointer puppy to be evaluated. She was on a mission, a mission to develop the first bumblebee detection dog in the Western hemisphere.
Jacqueline: I got Darwin as a puppy. I decided to go with German short-haired pointers because I read that they smelled close to the ground. They kept their nose low. So I was like, well, if I’m looking for bumblebee holes, I might as well get one of those. Also, I’ve always kind of been into German short-haired pointers – they’re beautiful dogs. Anyway, I got little Darwin from a breeder in Virginia and I got him at eight weeks. He had good hunting and championship lineage. I got him for the purpose of my research.
Jason: As we found out, there are a lot of things you’re going to need in order to train an effective bumblebee detection dog. A great dog and a proven plan are critical to make it work, but more importantly, you’re going to need lots of bumblebees.
Jacqueline: I didn’t really know what I was doing. It was my first bumblebee colony ever. I’ve had honey bees, so I was like, cool, I can do this. No problem. But it was too cold barren, because I was doing it in the spring cause I wanted to get the project underway so I ordered them online. You can get them, I think it’s Koppert or something is the company, but you can order bumblebees online and they’re shipped to you, overnighted and then …it’s really funny, I get this frantic email from the Biology apartment. There are bees here. Somebody needs to come pick them up, and I walked into the mail room and they’re just buzzing in the corner.
Jason: They are in a box, right?
Jacqueline: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, so I brought them home and you just opened the door and let them go. There’s one exit/entrance hole. They basically come in a box and there’s like one entrance/exit hole and I just put them in my window with the entrance facing out and just block the rest of the window with towels, but after a while the hive starts getting big. That’s the fun part and they start to try to find ways out and increase their space. So they would start to chew the air holes open on the boxes and you could just hear them crunching it while you were sleeping. So that was really interesting. You’re just waiting for them to escape and sting you. But it was fine. I got stung once.
Jason: Did they escape?
Jacqueline: Yeah, totally. Sometimes, I’d come home. Well, I have a great roommate, Paige Anderholm. She was my roommate at the time and she would sometimes call me, at the beginning, she would call me and be like, Jacqueline, there are bees everywhere. Can you come home? Yeah, I’ll be right there. But eventually she got to the point where she would get in there when I had to get the nesting material, she’d get in there with me and handle it. So she really evolved as a bee person.
Jason: What exactly attracts a dog to the nesting sites of bumblebees may come as a bit of a surprise to some. A key difference between the honeybee and the bumblebee is what aids in their conservation.
Jacqueline: Honeybees are actually really neat and they usually poop and defecate outside their colonies, but bumblebees stink. They smell so bad so that definitely helped Darwin out in the beginning phases.
Jason: Even though Jacqueline and Darwin’s efforts are now focused in the Rocky Mountains of the United States, she has plans to use Darwin’s unique skillset to help with bumblebee conservation elsewhere.
Jacqueline: The plan with Darren eventually is to like do international bee conservation work. I want to go all over and help people with pollinator conservation cause it’s really important for the people too.
Jason: Bumblebees are in drastic decline across North America and Europe. Studies suggest that bumblebee populations have declined 30% in the course of a single human generation. Climate change, among other factors, seems to be having a huge impact on bumblebee numbers making Jacqueline and Darwin’s work more important now than ever
Jacqueline: Actually, now because the time bees are emerging and the time certain plants are emerging in the Alpine are super wonky now. They’re not as they were before, and that’s really important because in the Arctic for example, Bombus frigidus which is an Alpine bee, they always emerge within 24 hours of this Willow Catkins, which is like a Willow Bush, their flowers blooming, which is really interesting. So if the weather’s all crazy and the plants aren’t emerging at the right time, it could throw them off. And in that time when their colonies are so dependent when they first started establishing, if their plants are not out, that colony is going to go down, so it’s really important. Climate change could really have a lot of negative impacts on bumblebees, especially if the flower blooming timing keeps changing and stuff like that, with strange weather patterns, that could really mess them up. So that’s why we want to get in there now and get an eye on them, and the only way to do that really in this area is with Darwin
Jason: Up next, we hear how dogs are being used to combat declining numbers in turtle populations, and stay tuned to learn how scientists are using dogs to help save the koala, one of Australia’s most iconic marsupials.
Our next segment features Christian Fritz, a dog trainer and military veteran who founded K9s 4 Conservation after finding his calling to help sea turtles in Texas.
Christian: We have sea turtle nest detection dogs that we worked down the Texas coast with the national seashore and the University of Texas Marine Science Institute. That’s a pretty rare field of detection work at this point. As far as I know, there has been two other sea turtle nest detection dogs prior to ours.
Jason: With six out of the seven sea turtle species classified as threatened or endangered, caused primarily by human activity, it goes without saying that they need all the help they can get. Christian got involved in their conservation to some degree by accident.
Christian: I initially started working doing search and rescue, so I trained the human remains detection dog. I also trained them for tracking, and I trained a lifeline dog, so I had experience with detection dogs doing search and rescue stuff and was trying to figure out what to do for my girlfriend’s birthday last year. And she really liked sea turtles. And so I was trying to Google sea turtles in Texas to see if there’s anything we could go to – aquarium or something- and ended up finding the National Seashores website, where they talk about their sea turtle program. They have a nesting program here and I was reading, I saw it on the click hole. I was reading all the stuff about it. It was really interesting and they were talking about they have people that drive up and down the beach, that patrol the beach looking for nesting turtles, and ideally they will see the turtle on the beach and they can go over to the turtle and they can get measurements and check on her health and they’ll actually mark the nest while she’s still laying the eggs, and then they move back, let her finish laying the eggs and then she crawls back into the ocean.
Later on, they’ll come out and we’ll actually collect the eggs cause, in Texas they collect the eggs. There’s few enough of the nests and there’s enough threats from tides, predators and also from people, because you can drive on a lot of the beaches down here, but they actually collect the eggs and either re-nest them in protected corrals or they have an incubation facility at the National Seashore. So they collect those eggs and they move them, but sometimes they’re not there when the turtle is nesting. A lot of times we’ll be driving by and we’ll see tracks in the wet sand and the turtles that they’re specifically dealing with are Kemp’s Ridleys, which are the smallest sea turtle in the world. They are still about a hundred pounds. They’re not little turtles, but for sea turtles, they are little, and they like to nest when it’s windy. So the combination of high winds and small turtles means that the tracks they leave in the dry sand can be completely gone in 30 or 40 minutes. So the turtle crawls up, she lays her eggs, she goes back in the ocean and 30 minutes later you drive by and you might see some flipper prints in that wet sand so you know that a turtle crawled up and you know that a turtle crawled back into the ocean, but you don’t know where on the beach that turtle went. You know she could have laid her eggs the second she got off the wet sand. She could have crawled a hundred feet back and laid her eggs. You really have no idea. Did she turn? Did she …? I don’t know, and so at that point, when they don’t have any tracks, they employ a lot of different methods to try to guess where the turtle laid her eggs. Well, they often lay them in these areas or in this kind of sand. They’re looking for broken vegetation or places where loose sand is piled up on some vegetation where the turtle was fleeing, sand in the air. So trying to get every little thing they can and then they basically take their best guess and they have to go probe for the nest.
So they take these probes and they carefully insert them. You need years of training to be able to do this. They carefully insert them in the sand. It’s like looking for a landmine – very, very carefully, going through the area until they find the soft spot. It’s about eight inches across, and that will be the neck of the nest, and then they can dig it out. The problem is that can take them a couple of minutes. I’ve seen them. It’s pretty amazing. I personally witnessed one of their turtle techs come out and look and go, I’m pretty sure the nest is right over there, and I’m looking at it and there’s nothing on this beach that tells me anything. And he walked over and I think on the fourth poke, he got it. These guys are really good, but there are times when they don’t find them for hours, days and sometimes they never find them.
So, reading about probing for nests for hours, I was like, man, I bet they could use dogs for this, and so that’s when I sent an email in and Dr. Shaver replied to me, and she said, hey, we don’t have this capability anymore. And so I said, would you want that capability? And she was like, well, we don’t have a whole lot of money, so we can’t really afford $50,000 for a specialized dog, and so I offered to do it as a nonprofit. We can train the dog and handle the dogs for them and then they don’t have to even worry about it. We’re just there to help them out. I drove down to the beach. I met with Dr. Shaver. We talked for a number of hours and I went home and started training dogs that day.
Jason: As you heard in our previous story, Jacqueline was able to simply purchase bumblebees to train Darwin. In Christian’s endeavors to help save the sea turtles, getting the material he needs to train the dogs is difficult.
Christian: Yeah. So, what we use is sand from the nest. So once the turtle patrollers see a turtle, they mark the nest, they come by later on and they collect all the eggs, and at that point, it’s just a hole in the beach. And so we’ll scrape some of the sand out of the area where the nest was, and that’s what we use to train the dog. So they’re getting the smells of the turtle nests without actually having to have any turtle stuff, which is controlled cause they are an endangered species. One of the problems that we have with using the sand is that I don’t know how much scent is in any given scoop of sand. So, it’s impossible for me to say I’m going to start big and work down to minute amounts of smell because I don’t know how much smell I have. I can’t smell it. There’s no way to look at it and see. And so I just have to assume essentially that the scent is evenly distributed throughout the sample, even though I know that it’s not. And so that’s one of the big factors that’s kind of holding me back at this point, training-wise. I wish that exceptions were easier, but at the same time I understand why they are not. There’s, probably a lot more people trying to steal sea turtle eggs that are trying to train dogs to help the government find them and protect them. So I get it. I do wish that it was otherwise, but unfortunately that’s kind of where we’re at.
Jason: In his quest to preserve the sea turtle population, Christian trained with his dogs every day for months prior to actually exposing them to nesting sites on the beach. His work required lots of travel and tons of hard work.
Christian: We did daily training. I live in San Marcus, right between San Antonio and Austin, and we did daily training up here for about two months, and every two or three weeks, we would go down to the beach and we would practice on the beach and we would get to practice on real nests. So we would go out on days that we expected high nesting activity and the turtle patrols would mark a nest and we would come by and I’d worked the dogs on known locations. So I know there’s a nest here. I know where the nest is. I can work the dogs on it, and they were doing really well. I have some cool videos on the Facebook and on our Instagram page of the dogs working through those nests. There’s a great one where Saul is coming up the dune and he has this really, really great, probably 140 degree change of behavior where he snaps almost right back to where he was going as he came into the scent cone, works the scent cone perfectly, goes right up to the nest and indicates. It was a really great example of a detection dog working. So we train them up like that for a while, and then July I spent working the dogs only on the beach. So we worked a lot on the beach
Jason: After putting in lots of work to find sea turtle nests, Christian and his dogs finally got the call that they’d been waiting for. It was now time to see if all this work would pay off.
Christian: We got a call from the Marine Science Institute. The animal rehabilitation team runs their turtle patrol for Mustang and San Jose Island, and they had found tracks from a loggerhead turtle on Mustang Island …or not Mustang, it was on San Jose Island, and they’d gone out the day before and they spent four or five or six hours looking for this nest and they just couldn’t find it. They probed and they’d dug and dug and they probed and they couldn’t find it. so they called me up. They were like, Hey, can you come out? I was like, yeah, absolutely. This is literally what I’ve been spending these hundreds and hundreds of hours of training to do. Yes, please. Let me come help. So we had to take a boat out to the Island cause there’s no road that goes out there. It’s a privately owned Island, and the owners graciously allow the Marine Science Institute to come out and look for turtles and collect eggs on their property, which is really nice of them.
So we brought the dog out. We brought Dasha out on the boat and we had to take a little UTV halfway across the Island to where these turtle nests, where the turtle tracks were, and I let Dasha out and she started working and very, very early on, she crossed right by this one spot. She head-checked into a club of grass and I noted that to myself. I was like, okay, that was really good head check. That was definitely some interest and I mean, we’re dealing with some really, really faint smell. It’s really tough work. There’s not a lot of scents for them to work with. So, she checked that, worked some more and a couple of minutes later she started working from downwind, started working towards that same area, and after working through that for a little while, she finally got just about to where she had head-checked in that first sprig of grass and indicated the nest was right there.
From where she very first had that head check, it was probably three feet away. So she was able to go in, found the right spot, indicated and the biologist was out with us was able to probe and find the eggs and then we got to bring the eggs in, and it was only like 110 loggerhead sea turtle eggs. Loggerheads are an endangered species, so a nest that I got to go to help save that otherwise probably would have been predated. That was pretty cool.
Jason: It’s not only nest and that eggs are in danger. Weather in the winter months can also create a perilous situation for sea turtles. So Christian and his team of dogs are working on strategies to save sea turtles affected by cooler temperatures on the Texas coast.
Christian: One of the things we’re working on is to train the dogs so there’s another thing that happens with these Kemp’s Ridleys so much, at least not here in Texas. We have these barrier islands that go basically along the entire coast and inland of the barrier islands are these bays that are relatively shallow, and the juvenile green sea turtles like to go hang out in those cause there’s a lot of food there and they’re safer from predators. Not a lot of 14-foot sharks swimming around in 12 feet of water. So the juvenile green sea turtles will swim in there and they live there. The problem is when we have a really big temperature change, so we have these big Arctic fronts come through from Canada and it’ll drop the water temperature cause it’s so shallow in the Bay from 70 degrees to 45 degrees sometimes overnight, but certainly in a matter of a day or two. And that drastic of a temperature change doesn’t allow the juvenile greens enough time to swim back out to the Gulf of Mexico, cause there’s only a very few places where there’s cuts in the islands where they can get through. What happens is the turtles get hypothermic, we call it cold stunting. So the turtles get cold stunned at about 48 degrees water temperature and they can’t move. So they just kind of float in the water and the wind pushes them up along the shore and they get washed up on the beach, so they’re vulnerable to getting hit by boats cause they can’t swim out of the way and they’re floating on the surface. They can drown because they can’t do anything. They can’t even have the energy to lift their head out of the water to breathe. They can also freeze to death, and then when they wash up on shore, anything can just come along and eat them.
They can’t get away. There’s nothing they can do. They are just stuck there on the beach, and so one of the things that we are trying to train the dogs to do is actually to go out and help find those turtles. In fact, last Wednesday, I went down and helped save some of the Simpson Golds and Greens, and you are walking on the beach and you’re like, there’s one, there’s one, there’s one, there’s one, just lined up along the beach. but there’s other places where it really looks like a mud island. It’s only an inch out of the water and you jump in and you sink up to your knees in mud and you’ve got to slog across this Island to see if there’s any turtles, if there’s bubbles or grass. These are all things that people aren’t going to be able to detect a turtle in, right? If there’s a bunch of bubbles, you might not be able to see a turtle inside that. Well, the dogs aren’t looking; they’re smelling. So the dog picks up the scent. They’re going to be able to go in; plus, my dogs love it in the cold and the mud. You throw him out of the boat into knee-deep mud and it’s 40 degrees outside. They’re going to have the time of their lives. They love that stuff. So they can go cover an island and if they detect the turtle, we can bring the boat around, swing by, jumped out, get the turtle and bring it back, and if there’s a turtle, we put the dog on the boat and go to the next island and not have to get off ourselves and trying to slog around through this island.
Jason: Training dogs to save sea turtles is phenomenal work, but as Christian explains his work has some other pretty cool perks.
Christian: Getting to watch the turtles come up on the beach and lay their eggs is really, really, really cool. The whole first year, I kept missing it. I would drive up right after the turtle went back into the water just again and again. This past summer, I was actually the first one there on a couple of turtles. One day we had a small rainstorm and we had four turtles crawl up within a mile of each other, and all right about the same time. So, getting to see the turtles come up was something really cool, but I think probably the coolest thing is watching the babies going into the ocean. There are just hundreds of them. They’re adorable. They’re running off into the ocean. In the water, they just start swimming and they’re really, really cute, and I think that’s one of the coolest things to watch is the little babies hit the water and swim for the first time.
Jason: Be sure to stay with us as our episode continues. When we return, we head to Australia and learn how a dog named Bear is helping save animals that are often mistaken for bears.
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Announcer: The bush fire crisis has had a huge impact on South Australia’s wildlife. Tens of thousands of koalas and kangaroos killed and grave concerns about the survival of some of our unique species. The Army and volunteers…
Romane: My name is Dr. Romane Cristescu. I’m a research fellow at the University of the Sunshine Coast and I created a special team that trains dogs to look for koalas in koala habitat, and we are called Detection Dogs for Conservation and we are in a little part of Australia called the Sunshine Coast. It’s in Queensland and we work all around New South Wales and Queensland, where koalas are quite vulnerable.
Jason: Dr. Cristescu has studied koalas for years. Her dedication to the species led her to crawling around on her hands and knees in the Australian bush for months at a time looking for koala scat, a critical piece of information that provides insight into the current state of the koala population. After years of collecting scat on her hands and knees, she felt that there had to be a better way. Suddenly she was struck by the idea of training a dog for the job. She presented her idea and was quickly laughed at and ridiculed, until she met a dog trainer who felt that the concept was valid. With some help, she developed and began to work her first koala scat detection dog. Soon thereafter, she was able to prove that the dog was a better option for the koala population.
Romane: We couldn’t do that with threatened species. We need to be better at it. And so we published that work, and we started talking to government and we started talking to researchers and to university to say, look, the current method is not that great, and you need more accuracy in your surveys because otherwise you’re going to make the wrong decision for this endangered animal. And this is how it all started. And then after that survey and after that comparison between my first scat detection dog and the human team, I was never going to go back to look for scats myself. The difference is just too big. We need to work with detection dogs [unclear; 6:30] much more than we are currently.
Jason: This idea took off and now she has a number of dogs in the field helping with her conservation work.
Romane: Four of our dogs are trained on scats; two on every scat – young one, old one, year old one. It’s all good. It’s too much habitat and the other two are trained on fresh scats only. So they ignored everything that is more than a week or two old, and now only take us to the freshest of the freshest scats. And then we had our only dog that is trained on the koala itself, the animal and the training was so different. the same training on scats is so you, I like dogs are excellent. I mean if you have a dog at home, they’re probably really good at sniffing poo, right? so that’s the easy part. They sniff it in their routine daily life anyway. So you just have to introduce that special poo, the koala poo and tell them when you snip that, that’s when we’re going to play.
And so the training for us, and that goes back to the old dog being OCD for play. It’s just a very simple association learning. So there’s a target scent you want, and for us it was koala scats and there’s a reward that the dog wants. And for all our dogs, it’s playing and so you just associate those two things, and dogs are obviously extremely intelligent. So that association happens in only a few days and very quickly they understand that each time they smelled that, they’re going to get to play and therefore they really, really actively search for that scent, and then when they find it, it’s right there in front of their nose. We tell them to drop to get rewarded and so that’s an easy thing to teach as well and then we have a detection dog for that scent. Now because they are conservation dogs, we then have a lot of work around them not chasing wildlife, reinforcement testing.
Jason: Considering the specialized work that is required and the environment that these teams have to work in, where does one find such special dogs for this amazing job?
Romane: We often say that it’s one in a million, and maybe it’s exaggerating, but not that much. It’s really hard to find a perfect dog for this job because they need to be ball-obsessed and want to chase small, fluffy quickly moving tennis balls. But at the same time we asked them to not want to chase small, fluffy little rabbits or possums that would run in front of them when we are in the bush, because they are conservation dogs, they actually are deployed in national park and really beautiful environment and we’ve got a duty of care for all the animals that live in that environment. And so we look for the dog that has a very high play drive, wants to play all day with us because that’s the motivation. That’s the reason why they are so happy to be with us, but at the same time we’re asking those dogs to not want to prey on any of the animals that are working, or that are living in the environment we work. So it’s a very difficult trade to have both that high play drive that they will prey drive and never wanting to chase any wildlife. and so it’s lucky for us that we are able to assess a lot of dogs in pounds because it’s very rare for us to find the right dog.
Jason: Dr. Cristescu goes on to explain that the dog they’re often looking for is one that many people wouldn’t be interested in.
Romane: It’s an interesting process but we select the dogs that are probably the people’s worst nightmare. They are high energy. They are totally obsessed by playing. They will not leave you alone. that’s because they want to play more than anything. They want to play more than they want to be patted or they want food for instance, for example. And so we actually go and rescue them. They are often abandoned because they are too much as a pet. and so we, we go to pounds and dog rescue groups and we ask them for their most crazy dogs, and the dogs that will never stop, that wants to run all day and that’s we want, which is good for the dog because obviously, that gives them a second chance at being who they really are. And the reason we want the craziest dog possible is that this is a way for us of forming a relationship where the dogs gets what they want out of it as much as we do.
So they want to play all day. We want to collect ecological data all day. And so it’s a perfect match because each time they find what we want, they get to play and they want to go to play every day. I often say, even though they are classified as working dogs, our dogs are play dogs. They only come with us because they want to play with us, and each day that we don’t go into the field, and that’s sometimes happen on weekends rarely, they’re very disappointed. They hate holidays and they hate Sundays if we don’t go to work because they find it very boring. So this is what we look for. a personality really that is, we call them what year if you want. just that obsession for playing is what we look for first and foremost
Jason: Training scat detection dogs to survey the koalas was something that the team got really good at, but in time they felt as though they needed something more. The koala is an elusive creature, spending most of their time sleeping or hiding in trees. Because of this behavior, the group took on the challenge of training Bear, a task that would prove not to be as simple as the dogs before him.
Romane: The scent part of the scat detection dog line of work is really easy. When it comes to Bear who was trained to indicate on koala, on the animal itself, that was actually extremely hard, and that took us a long time to really nail it and narrow down what it is that we want him to find, because we didn’t want him to find the urine or we didn’t want him to find the scats because we knew everywhere that would be a koala out, they would be urine and there would be scats. So we would be wasting a lot of time on those two odors that are always present, no matter where we are able to find a koala, because that’s their environment. That’s where they poop and that’s where they pee. So we actually use those odors as an odor to be trained not to indicate on, and so those were all negative odor, if you want, non-target odor.
We didn’t train Bear to indicate on those odors, but we always had fur in the lineup, and so we first we train him with fur and it was quite an interesting process because obviously you have to collect fur, which is not as easy as collecting scats. And so we had to work with vets and koala hospitals who very nicely donated all their fur to us. Then we had a lineup between fur from koala and fur from other animals to really teach Bear this is the animal we want, and all of that was really easy because we had collected this fur. We can put it on the ground. He can go straight to the source of the odor and you can reward. Obviously, the hardest part was to actually graduate from fur on the ground to an animal, a live animal in the tree, so we did a lot of working in parallel with people that had koala and knew where koala had walked and training Bear to scent the track. And then we did a lot of work with people that had animal that were wearing color because it’s easy for me to go around and drop koala scats and test the dogs on the scat, but I don’t have a koala in my pocket. So I couldn’t easily just drop a koala in the environment, and then teach Bear where the koala was, so the training and the testing of Bear was much harder and involved a lot more partners because we needed people that koala wearing red, you’re tracking color so that they couldn’t know every day where the koala were, and so we could then test Bear on those koalas. So it was a very long process and much, much more difficult and a very different training at the end than the scat detection dog
Jason: Bear’s job is substantially more difficult than the other dogs on his team. The location in which the koalas live and their elusive behavior makes his job quite challenging. This often leaves Bear slightly frustrated with his handler.
Romane: If you can imagine a koala up to 10, 20, 50 meter in a tree, and Bear is trained on their scent. So he’s on the ground. He’s not climbing trees obviously, so he needs to tell us where on the ground is the strongest scent of koala, and so sometimes if there’s no wind and the conditions are great, the scent just trickles down and Bear can find a scent at the bottom of the tree, but sometimes the scent is actually quite far from the tree, so he’s definitely got the hardest job of all our dogs. All the dogs are actually sniffing things on the ground that are koala droppings so that they’ve got an easy life there. So we both train down air scenting, so scenting the smell of the koala that trickled down from the tree, but also I’m tracking when koala move from tree to tree, they leave a track and dogs are good at following tracks. So he’s also doing that. Then trying to switch from one to the order and get us as close as possible to the koala that he can.
And then when he’s pretty confident that he’s as close as can be, he drops, so we actually train him to not bark because we don’t want to be frightening the koala obviously, and so he’s very quiet and he just drops and stays there and wait for us to actually see the koala, and poor Bear has to work with a team of humans and we often let him down because koalas are so hard to spot in trees, even though they are quite big, arboreal animals, they’re very quiet and they don’t tell you that they are there. They are often sleeping, but sometimes they’re looking at you when they see where you are and they quietly go around the trunk to hide from you, cause they don’t want you to find them. We always have a very tough job and we can only reward Bear if we hit a koala because this is part of the training they get to play with their toy when they found the odor. so Bear sometimes gets a bit frustrated at us for not being quick enough in our tasks when he’s done such a good job.
Jason: Over the years I’ve learned from my Australian friends that koalas are not to be called koala bears, as many Americans make the mistake of doing. As such, I found it ironic a dog trained to find koalas would be named Bear, so I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to learn about the origin of Bear’s name.
Romane: It’s funny that Bear is called Bear because it is true that a lot of people call koala koala bear, even though obviously they are very, very far from bears, and in that tree of life that I was talking about, they are marsupials so very far from bears. The funny thing is that this is just a coincidence because we rescue all our dogs, and when we are lucky, they come with their history and they come with a name and that was the case for Bear. So we didn’t have to name him because we actually had a bit of his history and we knew that he was already called Bear, and so we kept his name out of respect for him. Apparently, he was originally called Panda and then became Panda Bear, and by the time he reached us because he was rescued and abandoned a few times before we got him, by the time he reached us, he was Bear, which is a funny coincidence.
Jason: Australia is often known for being the home of some of the deadliest animals on the planet. In order to find a creature as cuddly as the koala, Romane and her team have to work in an environment that provides some considerable challenges.
Romane: So obviously some times of the year, it is a little bit hot, so that’s one of the thing that we have to be careful with our dogs, to be mindful of how quickly we can get really hot, and that’s also true for the handler, but our beautiful eucalyptus forest that we work in and we ecologists actually love being there, but a lot of people have told us how scared they are to walk into the forest because Australia is famous for snakes, and it’s got some of the most venomous snakes in the world so we have to be careful of that. There’s no zero risk, but all of our dogs ignore snakes. They are obviously not going to chase them so that decreases a little bit the risk, and then we also train them on very good commands so if we see a snake, we can stop the dog in its track and react to that, but we do have to be a little bit cautious of that for sure. And then the last thing people tell us is that the bush is very dense. It’s very scratchy. It’s very hard work. But I think both the dogs and us are just loving that environment. Put us in the middle of the big city and that would get a different response, but put us in a big forest and we are quite happy.
Jason: Even though the work for both the dogs and humans is hard, Romane explains that it also comes with some substantial rewards.
Romane: It’s just every day that you get to spend in nature and the natural environment is very special. And I think often I just stopped and I’m here and surrounded by beautiful old trees and the dog running around at my feet, and you just stop and you wonder how lucky one can be, and you wish that more people could spend more time in the bush because this is what sustains us. I think the beauty of nature, the beauty of the flora around us and when we are lucky, because wildlife does want to hide from us because we are the top predator really. But when we are lucky and we see some wildlife, whether it’s the lizard or the bird or when we extract a koala in a tree, we are just reminded how little we are and how much more important the natural ecosystem is, which we are part of, but we sometimes remove ourselves from and I think it’s not good for humans to be far removed from the ecosystem that sustained their life and because of its beauty that we shouldn’t forget, but also because we really must be aware that we need to protect that life support system. Otherwise we’ll be in a lot of trouble. Just a reminder of how beautiful nature is and that we need to stand up and protect it. This is the time.
Jason: The work of these conservation teams is more important now than ever. With koala numbers in decline over the past several decades, the recent wildfires in Australia have only increased the need to save the koala. It’s estimated that more than a thousand koalas have been killed in these fires, not to mention the loss of their precious habitat and food sources.
Romane: So koalas have a wide distribution in term of area they can live, but they are pretty limited to the coastal area. That’s the primer, if you want a higher density. You can call it quite a hotspot if you wanted to, and sadly, this is also where humans love to live, the coastal area, but also those are the most fertile area in term of agriculture. So, for quite a long time now we’ve been in direct competition with each other and humans tend to win obviously. so that’s the basic of where koala lives, and then those fire came this year and they are more intense than almost any fire that we had since record time, and since we had recorded fires and they also hotter and they also outside of the normal fire season. So those fires are unusual and obviously I’m not a climate scientist so the fire people call them mega fires now are unusual. And even though I’m not a climate scientist, I read enough paper and I’ll talk to enough climate scientists who think that these fires are out of the norm because of climate change. And so it’s not a good news for koala because the area that have burned, especially this year, is what we call prime koala habitat down in that big coastal fringe in New South Wales in particular and Queensland. And if you look at a map of where koala like to live and where those fires have been, there is a very good overlap, which is obviously adding to all the stress that koala already have to cope with, and in a changing climate and the koala are not going to cope very well there.
Climate change is one of the threats listed under the IECN classification and for good reason, because as we seen, there’s a direct induced death by fire, which is terrible and has hit really big well-known koala population where hundreds are feared to have been lost in the fire. So that’s the direct, very visible impact. Maybe direct but maybe not as visible is the threat of heatwaves. Koalas are not really good with coping with very many hot days in a row if you want. They’ve always lived with some hot days, but many in a row, it’s very difficult for them to regulate the temperature. And so they are actually dying of overheating, which is terrible and has potentially impacted a lot more population than we’ve seen because it’s a bit harder to detect if you are not there in the forest. Does it happen? And then there’s threat that maybe we don’t quite understand yet, but is the threat of the impact of increased CO2 in the atmosphere on plant growth. Plants move as quickly. The distribution to adapt to new climate conditions. So maybe some of the food trees that koalas use are trees that are not going to be able to adapt quickly enough to climate change. So maybe just basically the trees that koalas need are not going to be there anymore.
So all those things are a bit more uncertain, but we know that with all those different impacts, climate change is not going to be good news for koalas, and basically it is adding to the many heavy threats that are koalas are already struggling with. You know, every species deserves that we fight for them in this climate, but yeah, koalas have a special place in my heart for sure.
Jason: Thank you for joining us for this episode of A Life of Dogs. Be sure to head over to our website at alifeofdogs.com for some great bonus content, and to learn how you can support these remarkable conservation teams and the work that they do. A special thanks goes out to Jacqueline Staab, Christian Fritz and Dr. Romane Cristescu for helping us bring you their unique stories. this episode was produced by Jason Purgason and Abby Trogdon. I hope you have enjoyed these stories. Don’t forget to subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to leave us a review
Zero Zero
Zero/Zero: How a Blind Hiker and His Guide Dogs Tackle America's Toughest Trails.
This is the inspirational story of Trevor Thomas and his two guide dogs, Tenille and Lulu.
Stop and think for a second – how many steps do you take each day? You may have heard of the ‘10,000 step’ goal, a good daily target for most of us.
Hiking the Appalachian Trail (A.T.) is an ambitious feat. Stretching across 2,192 miles through 14 states, to complete the A.T., you’d need to complete a total of five million steps. Given that a thru-hike expedition typically takes five to seven months, that equates to almost 30,000 steps per day.
Now, imagine you’re doing 30,000 steps, by yourself, every day while hiking the A.T. – the world’s longest hiking-only footpath, across undulating landscapes and constant elevation changes. You’re at the mercy of hazardous weather conditions and the dangers posed by animals who may frequent the trail.
Finally, imagine that you’re doing all of this after being diagnosed with a rare eye disease which has left you completely blind.
This episode of A Life of Dogs features the incredible and inspirational story of Trevor Thomas – the first blind person to solo thru-hike the Appalachian Trail.
Embarking on the A.T.
After Trevor’s diagnosis in his mid-thirties, he decided to pursue hiking to maintain his independence. After getting a taste of long-distance hiking, he set off alone and completed the A.T., followed by solo-hiking other notable ranges such as the Shenandoah Mountain Range, the Smoky Mountains and the Grayson Highlands.
Trevor decided to embark upon the notoriously difficult Colorado Trail, but after struggling to complete it on his own, he realized he needed some help.
Obtaining help from Tennille
After speaking with Guide Dogs for the Blind in California, Trevor met Tennillle – his first guide dog. Tennille was athletic, intelligent and eager to learn; after a year of practice and training, Trevor believed they were ready to embark on their first long-distance trail together – the Mountains-to-Sea trail in North Carolina.
The weather throughout was terrible, making the trail difficult – but Trevor and Tennille completed it, and were the only ones to complete the thru-hike that year.
Following on from completing the Mountains-to-Sea trail, Trevor and Tennille have completed over 10,000 trail miles together. Together, they tackled The Long Trail, the Tahoe Rim Trail and the Ozark Highlands Trail.
Lulu - Trevor’s second guide dog
With 13,500 miles under her paws – more than halfway around the world – Tennille had earned a rest and a happy retirement.
In October 2018, Trevor decided to train up a new guide dog partner, Honolulu (Lulu).
Lulu recently demonstrated her capability as she helped Trevor thru-hike the Collegiate Peaks Loops in Colorado – a breathtaking 160-mile loop at high altitude.
In this episode of A Life of Dogs, you’ll hear the detail of this amazing story, and how Tennille and Lulu have played a crucial role in helping Trevor to maintain his independence and act as an inspiration to all of us.
For more information on Trevor Thomas, you can visit his website.
A Special Thanks to Trevor Thomas for sharing his story.
We also want to thank our episode sponsors. Be sure to visit them to learn more and show them your support. Without their continued support our podcast wouldn’t be possible.
Royal Canin
Website – Facebook – Instagram
Highland Canine Training, LLC
Podcast Transcript
Click ‘Show transcript’ below to read the transcript from this episode of A Life of Dogs.
A Life of Dogs Podcast – Season 2, Episode 2 (S2, E2)
Episode Name: Zero Zero Blind Hiker
Host
Jason Purgason
Guest
Trevor Thomas
Duration
59:39 minutes
Broadcast Date
January 19, 2020
Jason: Support for A Life of Dogs is brought to you by Royal Canin. Royal Canin offers precise, effective nutrition for dogs based on size, age, breed, and to address specific needs. To learn more about Royal Canin, visit them on the web at royalcanin.com and by Highland Canine Training offering professional dog training solutions and premiere canine education. Learn more at highlandcanine.com.
I’ve had the fortune of being a professional dog trainer now for more than 20 years. In those 20 years, I have had an opportunity to do some pretty remarkable things with dogs and I’ve also had the opportunity to meet other people and see them do some pretty incredible things with dogs as well. None of those things, however, compare to what you’re about to hear in this story.
Trevor: Had just left Munson, Maine and that is the last stop on the AT before you go into the 100-mile wilderness and the last before you will get to Katahdin and finish. It was getting close to the end of the season. Rain had come and there were threats of a hurricane. Hurricane Kyle was supposedly going to be closing in on the 100-mile wilderness. Well, I decided at that point that I didn’t want to hike 2100 miles and not be able to finish, regardless of whether it was a hurricane or not, so I made the decision to go into the wilderness knowing that a hurricane was coming and it hit with full force. As far as hurricanes go, it wasn’t a bad one according to North Carolina standards, but it was a Class 1, and I don’t ever recommend trying to go hiking in a Class 1 hurricane in the most remote section of the AT, because what you do is when you walk in, there’s a big sign and it warns people take 10 days of food because there is no exit point once you go in the 100-mile wilderness.
I suffered through four to five days of the worst. The trail was flooded, tree limbs were coming down, the worst rain I’d ever experienced, the worst wind I’d ever experienced, and I basically muddled through. With the trail being washed out by water, I couldn’t feel the trail. I’m being battered by everything. It was basically I prayed just to get from point A to point B. The one thing that Maine has that most of the rest of the AT doesn’t is they decided to let you cross your own rivers. They don’t put bridges over them, so I nearly drowned in the first five stream crossings that I had and finally thought I caught a break. The hurricane blew through and we got sunny weather and I left the shelter in the morning thinking, okay, the hurricane is gone. It’s going to be smooth sailing. I got four days to get to Katahdin. I walked around the corner and smack dab into a river I knew was there. I knew the dangers, but in the chaos I’d forgotten that that was the day I was coming up on it. It was the widest river crossing on the AT. It’s dangerous in good conditions to the point where they string climbing rope across the river so you can hold onto it to avoid getting swept down the stream. It was also 38 degrees, so it was going to be a cold river crossing. I had two choices – wait for somebody to come, which I hadn’t run into somebody in four days. I didn’t have enough food to wait, or risk it. Grab onto the rope and cross the river.
Well, I started crossing and the hurricane had dumped so much water that the river was swollen, and so the little areas that I should have been going across was a full blown torrent of water coming down. Made it halfway across and walked into an underground boulder field and that was pretty much my disaster. I couldn’t go around it because there wasn’t enough rope. I had to go through it. So I went through it and I actually managed to – I hate to say it at this point – but I managed to rim rock myself in the middle of a river. I got to the point where I stood up on a boulder to get out of the water so I didn’t get my legs broken between boulders and I realized that I couldn’t go backwards and I couldn’t go forwards. I also realized I couldn’t balance on that rock forever. So I devised a plan that I was just going to ditch my pack, because that’s what you do in a river. You ditch your pack so if you do dump in, you’ll be able to hopefully swim to the side.
When it’s 30-some degrees and it’s 20s at night-time, I realized I couldn’t afford to lose my pack, cause it would be gone downstream forever and then I’d be wet and I’d be pretty much going to die. So I made a gross error. I tied my Para cord onto my pack and I tied the other end around my waist. I ditched my pack so I could get my balance and hopefully jump to the next rock, and in about half a second, a hundred feet of Para cord laid out and my pack had turned into an anchor and it ripped me off the rope. I went into the river and basically, I don’t know. It was nothing I did that was miraculous. I didn’t save myself. The river spit me out 100, 200 yards down on the side of the stream. So now I was in a river, I just almost drowned myself. It was 38 degrees and I was sopping wet. I got my pack back because I pulled it in, but everything was wet. All my clothes were wet, my rain gear was wet, my sleeping bag was down and the dry sack had failed so it was wet. So all I could do was pretty much just put on every piece of wet clothing I had, wrap myself in my rain gear and then realized I don’t know where I am. I had to figure out, go upstream, upstream, upstream, periodically feel the ground to try and find the trail to find the trail to find the trail and eventually found it. Couldn’t stop hiking for about 11 hours because if I stopped, I got cold. If I got cold, I got hypothermia and die. So I kept hiking, hoping to God I would run into someone that could build me a fire because I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t find the wood. I didn’t know how to build fires. I was horrible at it and I got to a shelter and I was just spent. Hadn’t found anybody and I just sat there and I’m like, Oh God, this is bad. The sun is going down, the temperature is going down. I am still wet.
So I was like, okay. I started shivering and I’m like, I’m going to die. That’s it. I blew it and I’m sitting there. I had this little panic unit and I can press this button and somebody’s going to come and get me. Then I realized in the 100 mile wilderness, it could take them days to get me. And I’m like; I’m not going to go out like that. So I said, I’m not pressing the button. I’ve been cold before. Maybe I’ll do jumping jacks all night. Well, I didn’t know.
And all of a sudden I heard people and I’m like, God, please stop at the shelter. Stop at the shelter, stop at the shelter. And it turned out to be friends. People I hadn’t seen in months. They were probably a week behind me for a month. They knew I was up ahead. They got to Monson and they heard that dimwit me decided to go into the wilderness. So they went in after me and … it was surreal. They built me a fire. It was so hot that it burned my shoes when I was trying to dry my shoes and those guys basically … now they saved my life. So yeah, that was probably the worst. But the best thing was it was also my best day. I didn’t quit. My name is Trevor Thomas and I am the only professional blind long distance hiker in the world.
Jason: From A Life of Dogs, I’m Jason Purgason and this is the story of Trevor Thomas who relies on a guide dog to help him navigate some of the most grueling long distance hiking trails in the country.
Trevor: I didn’t start hiking until after I went blind and that was back in 2006. I started recreationally. I had to teach myself because I found out after you go blind; you’re not supposed to do those things. You’re not supposed to do any of the crazy things that I did before I went blind. So against my orientation and mobility instructor’s advice, I learned how to hike and instantly found out that it was the one thing in my life that I could control as a blind person. It was the one place that I felt alive and in control. So what started off as recreational therapy turned into an obsession and then I found out that there was a thing called long distance hiking and everything spiraled from there. I actually walked into a gear store because I kept breaking my cane. The little white thing with the red tip that identifies us as a blind person when we’re going around town, they don’t work on a trail. Kept breaking them and I was getting in trouble with my own instructor because she figured out what I was doing. So I was at the outdoor store talking to this kid here in Charlotte, North Carolina. His name was Matt and I’m like, help me. He said, okay. He showed me these trekking poles. They are like ski poles for hikers. And while he was telling me or while he was showing me these things, he was talking about an expedition that he’d just been on. He was out in the woods for six months. He nearly froze to death. He came across bears, all sorts of these things and I was enthralled and it sounded like something that I needed to do and I don’t know what possessed me, but I asked him, I said, what was it? And he said, I just through hiked the Appalachian Trail.
He explained what it was. He said, I started in Georgia and I hiked 2,175 miles without stopping to Maine. Something clicked in my head. I decided that’s what it was going to be. If I would be able to do that like everybody else, not have somebody drag me from one end of the trail to the other – I wanted to go alone – then I’d get my life back as a blind person. So that’s how it started. And once I got into it, I found out it was much, much more than just putting on a little day pack and walking, stopping, camping, getting up the next day and doing it again. It turned out to be a full blown expedition.
Before I went blind, I was into extreme sports. I was the quintessential adrenaline junkie. Started skiing at the age of 3, was into back country skiing and out of bounds skiing by the time I was in my early teens. That got a little bit too tame for me so I got into mountain biking, downhill mountain biking. Graduated to skydiving, and then eventually it was racing Porsches. When I went blind, all of that was gone. Everybody said you can’t do that anymore, and I needed to find something and that’s something was hiking. I had never done any overnight hiking before I went to the AT. I trained myself, I day hiked, I set up my tent and I practiced using all my gear in what I called advanced base camp in the little woods in my mom and dad’s backyard, and so the first time I sat on trail and the first time I did an overnight hike was the AT.
Well, my plan was simple when I left for the AT. I know that, or I knew at that point that the AT was 24 inches wide and it was the most well-travelled trail in the world, so I counted on the fact that there would be other people there. If I got in trouble, I could ask for help. But I also knew that every sign was etched. So they engraved each sign with side trail to shelter and it had an arrow, or it said, you know, next shelter, 12.5 miles. So what I learned to do is I kept track of cadence, which is how fast I hiked and I kept track of time and that gave me distance. So hiking for me is a lot of math. I would keep track of my cadence and time, give me my distance. When I got close, I’d start paying attention to what it was that I needed and then when I came to a trail intersection or came to a road crossing, and then I’d go from basically pointed to point B. I called it the highest stakes games of connect the dots is what I was playing. There were times I got in trouble where I simply didn’t know the trail would split and there was no sign or the sign was knocked over, and if you could see those little white blazes, you knew which way to go but I didn’t.
So my backup plan was to sit and wait, and I’d wait and wait and wait until somebody would come by. If it was a through hiker, then I’d say, Hey, I’m going to Maine, which way’s the AT? And they’d tell me. If it wasn’t a through hiker, I carried a copy of the Through Hikers Companion with me, which was the definitive guide map book, everything you would need to hike the AT. And I would simply hand it to the person and say, where am I? I need to go north. And after they got over their shock value and all of that, then they’d open my book, they’d find it, and then they’d tell me where I needed to go. There were a lot of places when I got into Northern Terminus where there was no one. I didn’t realize when I started the AT, I knew 4,000 people were going to start. So I figured there would always be somebody around, but there’s also an 80 to 90% drop off rate. So the further north I got, the fewer people there were. And by the time I hit say someplace like Massachusetts and into Vermont, everybody I’d met down in the southern part of the trail was gone, and I would go a week, two weeks with no one around.
So it was a lot of make sure I’m going in the right direction. A lot of going forward, feeling the trail with my feet. The AT, since it’s heavily travelled is a very worn trail. So I learned through the feel if I was on what I called the ‘mother’ trail, which was the AT or a side trail, which would not be as well travelled, things like that. I’ve also learned over the years to sense what sighted people see. I can use wind patterns to tell if I’m going into a valley. I’ve used the old trick that a lot of Special Forces do, am I going north by feeling the moss on the sides of trees or on the sides of rocks? There are a lot of places that it was simply I went on my gut feeling, because you go into a boulder field, which is a blind person’s worst nightmare, getting out the other side. A lot of times I’d get on the other side, but there was no trail so I’d have to go up and down the side of the boulder field until I found the trail and could keep going.
So it was a lot of trial and error, but my one rule of thumb was never go forward unless you’re absolutely positive you know which way you’re going, because I didn’t want to be the idiot that the search grid kept getting wider and wider and wider because I didn’t know where I was and I just made things worse and worse. And I also carried a little spot unit with me in case everything went sideways. And that’s a little GPS, emergency personal rescue beacon. If I really got into trouble, I could press the button and it would send out my coordinates and then my hike would be over, but at least I wouldn’t be dead.
I started let’s see, April 6, 2008. I finished October 8, 2008, so six months and two days it took me, and a whole lot of adventures in between.
Jason: For Trevor, completing the more than 2,000 mile Appalachian Trail was a phenomenal accomplishment. But with his thrill seeking attitude, he knew he had to do more.
Trevor: After the AT, I decided I had to go farther and found out that while I was on the AT, people like to write, you know, reporters like to write stories about me and people read those stories and they watched the interviews and they listened to the radio, and some of the people that listened and watched and read were gear companies of the gear that I was wearing. So I got calls from these companies and they said, hey, what are you doing next? We would like to sponsor you. So I said, wow. Ended up finding a way that I could do what I wanted to do, what I needed to do and get paid to do it. So I took about a year to figure out how to do the next step, which in long distance hiking is part of the Triple Crown that was the PCT. It is 2,654 miles from the Mexican border into Canada. I did my research, figured out if I was going to be attempting it the way I did the AT, I would be dead very, very quickly because fewer people started the PCT when I did it than actually finished the AT.
So I called up some of my hiker friends from the AT and said, I got a crazy idea. I want to do the PCT, let’s go. So I started what I called team Pharsight, which was a group of my hiking buddies that would do anything and everything to make sure that I got to the other end of the trail and did it alive. So we did that and followed that with the John Muir trail, the AT Tahoe rim trail. I went back and did most of the AT in sections so I could actually enjoy it. Pretty much hiked anywhere and everywhere I could nonstop.
I headed to Colorado, I wanted to do the Colorado Trail, which is probably one of the most difficult and demanding trails in the United States, and I found out while I was hiking with my team that though I was paying for the expeditions, I was outfitting them. I was blind, so I was getting paid; they weren’t. I was a professional; they were amateurs. They couldn’t keep taking off six months here, three months there to keep going on these crazy adventures with me. So eventually I was running out of hiking partners and I went to Colorado and had a friend of a friend recommendation. You can probably see where this is going. I wanted to start trying to go solo because I had the experience at that point. I didn’t have everything really set in stone as how I was going to do it. So I showed up in Colorado and my partner never showed, so I couldn’t walk away from the state without even giving it a try. So I did. I made 5 sections, 124 miles and I did it simply by fumbling through, but I knew I wouldn’t finish. Had to get off trail and that was my first non-complete that I ever had. I decided then and there that it was never going to have a human partner again.
Jason: Trevor suffered his first non-complete because he didn’t have the support he needed. To learn how his first guide dog helped him overcome this challenge, stay tuned as our episode continues.
Jason: Support for A Life of Dogs comes from Royal Canin. Royal Canin delivers precise nutritional solutions so your dog can perform at their very best level. To achieve a perfect balance of nutrients for each dog, they rely on extensive network of canine experts across the globe, including veterinarians, universities, dog professionals, and their own research and development center in France. Royal Canin helps your dog’s train and perform at their full potential. To learn more about Royal Canin, visit them on the web at royalcanin.com.
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Trevor: I had to figure out how I was going to navigate, because up until that point I was memorizing the trail. The trails that I wanted to do were so remote, so rugged that there would be sections that it was map and compass. There weren’t signs. There were no people. So I got a great deal when I got my first iPhone, which actually you could turn on this accessibility feature and it would talk. So I said, Hmm, if I could get somebody to write down all the data that was in a data manual, in little sections and email it to myself, then I could pull up an email and I would have my first guidebook for a trail. That was navigation taken care of. I was already doing my cadence and time and getting my distance, so I had the big picture on these trails and I decided, but I still needed a little help and I said, I’m going to get a guide dog. How hard could it be? I’ll have a guide dog. I can get around town. I hated my cane anyway, not because I couldn’t use it, but I hated the stigma that it attached to me. I’m like; a guide dog is a win-win. In town, everybody loves dogs. It’ll make blindness a positive experience, but the dog could also fill in the blanks. If I needed a stream, that dog could find it. If I needed a campsite, the dog could find it. So I started to apply to schools and then I found out that all the people that were seeing the articles written on me, seeing me on TV, well, the guide dog schools, we’re seeing that as well. And unlike the gear industry, you thought it was a great idea to sponsor a blind guy. And the people that were saying, oh, you’re really inspiring, the guide dog people said, you’re dangerous. We don’t want to give you a guide dog.
So I contracted every school in the country starting most locally to me and got the same result. They knew who I was. They said, no, you can’t have a dog. A couple of them even told me that I shouldn’t be doing what I was doing, and I was a bad experience or a bad example for other blind people. They might get the idea that they could do what I was doing and they’d go out and get hurt or killed. I was a bad example and it shocked me because their job was to help me achieve my goals. That’s why they are in business. So I finally got to the last school on the list – Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael, California, on the other side of the country. Called them up and said, I’m Trevor Thomas. I’m a blind long distance hiker. I would like to apply for a guide dog. However I need my dog to do everything that they do in town, but I need it to do guide work in the back country.
Expected the same result. And they told me, well, we think it’s fantastic that you want to do that. We don’t know if we can do it. It’s never been done before, but we’re willing to try. So I waited and waited and waited, and then finally, after about a year, year and a half’s wait, they called me and said, we have a match, and they said, we’ll fly you out and come to school and I met Tennille, which was my first guide.
She came perfectly trained, wonderful and wonderful abilities. She was athletic enough to do the 20 mile days that I needed her to do. However, they said, we don’t know how to train her to what you need because we don’t know what you need. So they sat down with me and in addition to the regular training that I needed to do to use my guide dog in town, they taught me how to train a dog and they said we’ll give you the tools. Then it’s up to you to train the dog as you come into situations to do the things that you need to do. When you get a guide dog, they have, basically the dog knows what they’re doing. You go to school to learn how to use a dog, so you can make sure that their personality fits yours, their cadence fits yours, or your lifestyle is going to be conducive to their personality, so that’s what you go to school for and they usually send you for either some schools are a month, some schools are three weeks, or some schools are two weeks, depending on your specific needs.
I went for two weeks and that would have been fine if it was just, go and learn how to use a guide dog, but I learned that there was a lot of extra things that I had to do. So while all my friends in class were taking time off to play with their dogs or just doing fun things around campus, I was out on trails with my dog. I was doing extra things to learn how to train a dog, things like that, so it was pretty much nothing that I wasn’t used to. I immersed myself into it and spent a solid two weeks, eight to 10 hours a day, learning how to use a guide dog and then learning how to train the dog to do new things, but when I got home, that’s when the real work started. I had just a thumbnail ability to be able to train a dog. When I came back, it was sitting down and putting into practice over and over and over again when I got home. Fortunately, my school has what we call field service representatives, and if I ever got into trouble with anything, any of the crazy things I needed to train my dog or any bizarre question that I came up with, they were there to help me. So that’s why it took me quite a bit of time before I decided I’m ready to risk not only my life, but her life and go out into the back country.
So I took a year off from doing my hiking. I told my sponsors, I’m going to get a dog. When I come back, I’m going to shock the world. I’m going to do what’s never been done and I’m going to take it to a whole new level. I’m going to go hiking just with me and a guide dog. No GPS, no maps, no human partner, no guide, just the two of us. And so they said great. And I worked with Tennille for a year. She became my job – every day, all day. We worked together, we trained together. I had to learn dog physiology. I had to learn dog first aid, back country first aid for dogs, so it too like hiking was much more than just training a dog to walk on a trail with me, because I knew she had the traits. She wanted to learn. She’s a genius. She had the physical ability to do what I needed her to do. Beyond that, it was basically, can I teach her? Will she enjoy the work, because you can train a dog to do anything? The thing that I had to have was a dog that could perform it, had the physical attributes to be able to go through that kind of rigorous exertion day after day after day after day, but would love to do it. There are lots of dogs that could have been trained, but if they don’t love to do it, they won’t perform the job well. So we really didn’t know and the biggest thing that I was warned is even if I managed to train her to go out on trail and we went on trail, nobody knew if she would come back and still want to do her guide work in town.
They didn’t know if she would be able to go from back country to town and then the back country again and go back and forth seamlessly. The only way we could try that was to actually take her and do a thorough hike. And amazingly enough, all I had to do was put her regular harness back on when we got home and it was like we never stopped. So she could go back and forth and back and forth at will. She learned bridges. She learned trail. She learned how to find me those blazes. She learned how to find me all the different types of signs that I needed, and it became a running joke. I always told people she will always find me a sign. She will always keep me on trail, not necessarily the sign or the trail that I need because she can’t read the signs. That was up to me. So I called her my detail girl and I was the big picture guy.
When a year rolled around, I decided we were ready to go and I decided to take a little stroll in North Carolina, the Mountains-to-Sea trail, a thousand miles from Clingman’s Dome in the Appalachians, all the way to the farthest reaches of the outer banks and we were going to go alone. The weather was so bad that year. The trail conditions were so horrible that literally we were the only two who completed the trail that year. The only two through hikers at all. We ran into a grand total of 13 people on trail. Not through hikers – people! So it was a true test of what I wanted to do. Can a blind person and a guide dog go out and not just not just survive, but thrive in the back country? And we did it. So that was the first experience I had with Tennille. Luckily she was a trooper because I know she’s going through her brain, she was sitting down and thinking what the heck are we doing? Why did you do this? But every day she’s like, let’s go. Let’s keep going. Let’s do this.
I started that trail on April 6th in honor of starting the AT. I like to start my East Coast trails on that day. Got a freak snowstorm. They actually closed the Smoky’s, so we had to push our start date back about six days to let the snow melt so we could literally get to the top of Clingman’s Dome. Got pounded with snow on the first part. Got rain after that. The first month we had nothing but rain and snow every day, all day, and we were just wet and miserable, cold. I began to wonder why the heck was I doing it because we just couldn’t get a break. All of a sudden, the weather went from winter to summer and we got scorched after that. We ran through two hurricanes. That was quite interesting weather. One of them under a pecan tree in the Outer Banks. Don’t recommend doing that. We just had horrible, horrible weather, but the cool thing was is that the outpouring from people that we met along the way was just amazing. People started showing up at trailer receptions just to meet us; more so they wanted to meet her, but it was really cool. It was a great way to see a state, no pun intended.
Jason: The Mountain-to-Sea Trail may have been Trevor and Tennille’s first long distance hike, but it definitely wouldn’t be their last.
Trevor: Some of the bigger trails with her would be Mountains-to-Sea, the Long Trail, Denton-Mackay, Tahoe Rim, the Colorado Trail. She got me back and helped me complete the one trail that I was unable to finish in my career without a dog, so she got me about back to that. We summited 9 of the 13 tallest mountains in the contiguous United States together. We did sections of the PCT together. We have done the John Muir, did Shuckstock in Washington. Let’s see. Parts of the Penn-Hoady, the only parts that we wanted to do. Sheltowee Trace and those are just some of the notable ones. Documented trail miles, I don’t count training miles or anything like that, but she was at 13,500 when she let me know that she was ready to retire.
Jason: To put that number in perspective, 13,500 miles is more than halfway around the earth. Tennille, who Trevor describes as one in a million, retired in 2018. She continues to live with Trevor as she watches her successor fill some pretty big dog boots.
Trevor: Honolulu, I returned from school with her November 14th of last year. She’s already proved her mettle. When Tennille let me know she was ready to retire, we are actually on the collegiate loop on the continental divide in Colorado on a 14,000 foot peak called Mount Yale. We were almost at the summit and she let me know. So I decided when and if I could train another dog, I wanted to pick up exactly where I left off. So I worked with Lulu for 9 months, 10 months solid, just like I did with Tennille. I thought it would be the same training, another dog. She had the same traits, everything like that, but I learned it wasn’t. They have different personalities, different things motivate them, so I had to learn a new training technique for her, but she took to the work, just like Tennille did, and after 10 months I said, okay. We did our shakedown hikes and it was time to go to Colorado and I took her on probably one of the toughest trails that you could take a dog on. She was the first dog ever to do it, not first guide dog, but the first dog to complete the trail.
We went to Colorado and basically the collegiate peaks are a series of 14,000 foot peaks along the Colorado Trail and continental divide. It’s a gigantic loop and you simply hike, summit, hike, summit, hike, summit, hike summit, and that was her first experience. It was a horrible snow year so the trail was in bad condition. We had a lot of avalanches that we didn’t know they were there. They weren’t in the guidebooks. Water sources were wiped off the map. Rivers or streams that were supposed to be there were gone. They had a lot of blight in the trees so the topography was not what we expected. It was a real learning experience. But for a dog that had only done shakedown hikes on the East Coast, going to high altitude, which I didn’t know if she could do, going into that type of environment where we had snowfields to cross, which she’d never seen snow in her life. We had boulder fields to navigate through that we had never come across boulder fields like these before. She was just a trooper. The trail was so bad in certain places that I went through two pairs of boots and her pads were still ripped up and she still kept going and kept going and kept going.
Jason: Working with a guide dog had a remarkable impact on Trevor’s independence on trails, but it also fundamentally changed the way he approached long distance hiking.
Trevor: Well, in one sentence, my days of ultra-lighting are over. Yes, everybody always packs too much. Over the years you learn what you actually do need and what you don’t need on trail. I learned that and I became avid into the whole ultra-light craze. How light can you go? You know, the lighter you are in your pack, the happier you are while you’re hiking and that’s what you’re there to do. The less items you have, the less comfortable you are in camp, or if you get into a serious situation such as weather, things like that, that are going to bog you down because you just don’t have as much available to protect you in a survival situation. Now when you hike with a dog, most people assume my dogs wear packs. They assume that they’re packing their water, their gear, their food, everything like that. Well, it’s not the case with me. It’s my idea to go, and these are my guide dogs. They are working animals. They are not pack animals. Their job is guiding so I pay the price. I carry their food, I carry their gear, I carry everything that they need, other than they choose a toy to take with them. They will carry that. Their packs are great for packing out small amounts of trash. They also carry a jacket so I have easy access to it and their boots. That’s it. So they really don’t carry any weight at all.
I learned very, very quickly that I needed to modify the types of food that they eat while on trail because kibble is very heavy. They actually eat as much on trail in weight as I do. So I doubled my weight for my gear. I doubled my weight for my food and I doubled my weight for my water, because it’s really hard to explain to a dog when you have 18 miles between your water source and the next one. They don’t really understand that if they don’t want to drink. So it’s one of those things where I go slower now. I have to, not that it’s a bad thing because I’ll fall less, but it’s one of those things where I earned my trails even more than I used to.
Jason: Trevor mentions that now with his dogs, he falls less. Over the years, he’s had a lot of experience with that.
Trevor: My injury count is long. Let’s see, I hiked 300 miles on the AT with splinter fractures in my left foot because at a place called Jump Off, outside of the NOC, I literally did that. I took a trip and fell down a very large rock staircase and broke my foot. That was bad. I’ve cracked my skull open. I broke four of my ribs when I was in Maine and still kept on hiking. Actually ended up, they didn’t heal properly, so I have a deformed rib cage now and it looks kind of funky, but it’s kind of a badge of honor for me. That’s another thing I can thank my dogs for is they keep me safe and I’ve had much, much fewer injuries with dogs than without. I kinda think they’re smarter than I am. They know not to walk up the side of cliffs. They judge situations a little bit more rationally than I do, so they’re a little bit more cautious and therefore I am. So they keep me safe.
Jason: Trevor goes on to explain that the terrain is not the only danger when you’re in remote wilderness.
Trevor: I’m constantly talking to my dogs. I’m either asking them things or yes, I do have conversations with them, so we scare a lot of wildlife away. On the East Coast, I found that bears are hunted by people with dogs, so bears smell us. They smell the dogs and they give us a really wide berth so that’s kind of nice. I really haven’t had too many encounters with bears since I’ve had either one of my dogs. That’s not to say out West, my dogs are on the menu so that has me concerned. Probably Tennille did a great job and so does Lulu with snakes, things like that. They alert me to them. They make sure that I give them a wide berth. All snakes to them are the same so it’s not they’re finding rattlesnakes for me or anything like that. It’s just if there’s a snake, we go around it. Tennille and I did have an encounter … well, we had two of them. We had one in Colorado and we had one in the Long Trail and that was with moose. And most people don’t think moose are very dangerous or anything like that. They’re just big, stupid oaf-looking creatures, but in actuality they can be the most dangerous creatures in the back country. They’re very, very mean. They were very nasty. They’re territorial and they will kill you. Especially when I ran into them when they’re in rut. Anything that enters their territory is free game. First one we encountered on the Long Trail, we were just walking by a marsh and I heard trumpeting from one of them a ways back and it’s kind of on guard. We walked up around the bank and then all of a sudden it came out of the water onto the trail, and there was two tons of very angry animal versus me and a 60 pound dog and I knew what to do. It’s very hard to do it but moose have a lot in common with me. They are nearly blind. If you can manage to muster the strength and the fortitude to stand perfectly still and you’re downwind from them, they can’t see you. So I froze like a statue and I thought for sure Tennille was going to start lunging at it or she was going to try and run away because I taught her anything big like that we go.
She must’ve sensed it. She must’ve known that this is bad. This thing is meaning a lot of bad ill for us. So she just eased right in back of me and stood perfectly still. We must have stood there for seemed like hours, probably 5, 10 minutes and all of a sudden the thing decided, I guess it wasn’t anything here in the first place and just sauntered off on along the way, and I waited and waited and waited for about another 30 minutes to make sure it wouldn’t come back and we went on. But that was another one of those things. It was just very … I mean people go out to find and see moose. I don’t want to, and yet I managed to walk right up into it.
Jason: In talking to Trevor, it’s pretty clear he’s far from finished and he’s got some pretty big plans for himself and Lulu in the coming year.
Trevor: I am finally through my Foundation … I’ve got a generous gift from some donors that I’m going to be able to fulfill a promise that I made to Tennille but wasn’t able to fulfill. I’m going to fulfill it for Lulu. I am redesigning the traditional guide dog harness, one that is comfortable for a dog and one that’s ergonomically correct for a person, and we’re training. We are getting ready for probably I would consider my most ambitious season that I’ve ever had. We’re going to start by going to Tahoe this summer and we’re going to do the Tahoe Rim to Reno. We’re going to solo that and then we’re going to keep going south and we’re going to hit Yosemite. We’re going to start in Yosemite and we’re going to do the John Muir southbound and we are going to summit Mount Whitney, which is the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States, and we’re going to do that solo as well. So that’s going to increase the altitude record we’ve already set for working with a guide dog, a little bit higher. Lulu will be coming into her own, not recycling trails that Tennille has already done. I’ve decided that I want her to do trails and basically not live in a shadow, so we’re going big. It’s all high altitude. It’s all very, very technical, very, very rugged, very remote hiking.
Jason: Trevor’s dogs have to work in both the city as well as some pretty rugged back country. So it got me curious. Is there one workplace that they prefer over the other?
Trevor: Both dogs love trail work more than they do city work. They enjoy the city work. They enjoy the mental challenge, but there’s a different spring in their step. There’s a different excitement when we approach a trail head and their regular harness comes off and either their pack or their trail harness goes on. They know, it’s now it’s more fun for them. They make more decisions. They’re more in charge than they ever are out in the regular world. So I think it really pushes their mental state and plus they are dogs. They are Labs. What Lab wouldn’t want to hike on a trail all day long, be able to jump in a stream, get muddy and get dirty? That’s what they like.
Jason: What am I forgetting to ask?
Trevor: Let’s see.
Jason: Interesting story that I don’t know about?
Trevor: Well, both dogs have already proved it thus far, but I used to have a rule that I will not go forward unless I’m 100% positive I know where I’m going. I have relaxed that rule now because my dogs have proved that I don’t necessarily need to know where I’m going. I’ve gotten into situations with both dogs where I’ve gotten to a section of trail that I just don’t know. I’ve gone down every avenue. I’ve come to a trail intersection. We go down one leg of the trail. It’s not right. We go down the other one a few hundred yards; it doesn’t feel right. Go down the other one; it doesn’t feel right and there’s nobody around to ask. I’ve literally asked them. I’m like, I don’t know which way. Both dogs have proved it. They’ve chosen correctly. So that’s something that nobody can tell me how they’re doing it. Are they following the smells of another hiker? Nobody knows how, but instinctively they know which way to go, better than I did in certain situations.
Jason: In working on bringing you this story and interviewing others about their experiences on the AT and other through hikes, one of the major upsides to many of the hardships of this experience are the breathtaking views along the way. As Trevor is completely blind, I wanted to know if he felt as though he was missing out on a big part of the experience.
Trevor: Yeah, I would say partially it’s different, but partially it is the same. I’ve gotten that question a lot of times. Why hike if you can’t see the view? And pretty much for me, I’m a long distance hiker for the same reason that everybody else is. Nobody in their right mind is going to go through months and months of suffering just for the view you get at the top of a mountain that you could get on a postcard at the gift shop. We do it for the accomplishment. We do it to find something that’s in you, to push yourself, to push your limits, to discover things about yourselves. But I actually, and it sounds kind of ironic, I would consider myself fortunate when I get to the top of a mountain where other people are sitting down with their cameras and getting a picture. I’m taking in everything else. So my experience is not the one-dimensional thing that you get on, on a photograph. I remember the sounds. I remember the weather. Was it warm? Was it cold? Was there a mist? Was there dew on the grass? So it’s pretty much a multidimensional thing for me. It’s more robust memory of any summit that I’ve been on, and I have my memories from it. I take rocks, I don’t like to publicize it and they’re only little rocks, but I take a little rock from each one, and each mountain has a different rock. So I have my pictures to go with it. But pretty much if I asked any of the sighted people that I’ve been with on a mountaintop, hey, what do you remember about it? They remember very, very little. I remember almost everything.
Jason: With a little help, Trevor had performed something rather miraculous with these two guide dogs. Earlier, he was accused of being dangerous and a bad example. As such, I was curious what those early doubters thought about Trevor’s accomplishment.
Trevor: Ironically enough, I thought after I proved everything with Tennille that those people would see the light or would have seen the light and would have supported me when it was time for me to get my next guide. It’s not like I was going to go to them and ask them to find me a guide. I found a school that not only could give me the dog I wanted but believed in me, but just when people heard Tennille was retiring and that I was going to have to get another guide, many of the experts in the industry still came out and said Tennille was a one-in-a-million. Yes, she was, but they also guaranteed that I couldn’t do it again. They guaranteed that I couldn’t train another dog, instead of saying he’s done it once, he’s got a chance. So you know, I would really hope that maybe after my second guide, they might sit down and say, hey, obviously it can be done and we grossly underestimated what these dogs can do so we should modify our own training practices. Maybe that’ll happen. I hope so because I have people call me, email me all the time saying, I want to hike with my dog. How do I do it?
Jason: Long distance hiking is not only a battle against the environment and Mother Nature. More importantly, it is a battle of will. One of the greatest impacts that many experienced hikers discuss is the loneliness that sets in during these hikes. I asked Trevor if this was an issue and how it impacted him.
Trevor: Not anymore. It was when I was on the AT. It was when I was hiking alone. It’s not now. I’m not alone. I have my dogs. They may not be the best conversationalists. They listen really well. So I’d say, yeah, you do get a little lonely for talking to someone, but for the most part, I’m perfectly content with my dogs. They understand me and we have a type of communication that I guess is not verbal, but it’s really special.
Jason: We want to thank you for joining us. This episode was produced by Jason Purgason and Abby Trogdon, our website, a life of dogs.com. Support for this episode of A Life of Dogs comes from Royal Canin. Learn more@royalcanin.com. We want to send a special thanks out to Trevor Thomas for allowing us the opportunity to bring you this remarkable story. I’m Jason Purgason. Be sure to subscribe to us on Apple podcasts, Google play, or wherever you get your podcasts, and stay tuned for episode three of our second season where we share more stories of A Life of Dogs.
Battle for the Alley
Rats have been reported in New York City since the colonial times. Today, scientists believe that the rat population has grown to over 2 million in NYC. New York has been called the “Worst Rat City in the World” by some. Most of the city’s rat population consists of the the Norwegian rat or Brown rat. Some Brown rats can grow to become two pounds and 20 inches in length. Controlling this population of disease carrying rodents is a huge challenge, but we found a group of hunting enthusiasts that are up for the challenge.
Ryders Alley is located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in NYC. The Alley is a rather short corridor that is lined with rat poison bait boxes. This particular alley gave rise to the Ryders Alley Trencherfed Society, also known as R.A.T.S.
R.A.T.S began in the 1990’s and was founded by Richard Reynolds. With an interest in preserving the working abilities of the terrier breeds, this group of volunteers venture out most weekends to hunt Brown Rats, also known as Norway Rats. These rats are much larger than most people imagine. Weighing in at around two pounds and growing up to 11 inches long, these creatures wreak havoc on the inhabitants of NYC.
The group uses a variety of breeds, most from the Terrier Group. These feisty little dogs are tenacious in their pursuit of rats. Terriers are known for chasing and killing vermin, even underground. As such, the dogs are typically divided into two groups, push dogs and catch dogs. “Push dogs” often burrow through trash piles and garbage bins, primarily using their noses, in order to push the rats from their hiding spots. The “Catch dogs” are incredibly fast and chase after and catch the rats as they flee from the garbage. This team effort is what makes this group of dogs so successful.
R.A.T.S has become internationally known for their work in NYC, New Jersey and other parts of the United States. As such, they have been featured on a number of documentaries, news stories and other features.
In December 2019, we had the pleasure to go to New York and hit the mean streets of NYC to follow along on a Friday night hunt with R.A.T.S. We saw a variety of dogs, met some great people and had an opportunity to see some awesome working Terriers in action.
With a lack of other options for effectively dealing with the massive rat population, this group and their fierce bunch of Terriers are making an impact on the rat problem of NYC. As a result, they are regarded as “heroes” by many of the people in the communities where they work.
For more information on rat terriers and the history of ratcatchers, be sure to take a look at our article!
Podcast Transcript
Click ‘Show transcript’ below to read the transcript from this episode of A Life of Dogs.
A Life of Dogs Podcast – Season Two, Episode One (S2, E1)
Episode Name: Battle in the Alley
Hosts
Jason Purgason & Greg Vaughn
Guests
Richard Reynolds, Jimmy Hoffman, Jason Rivera and other R.A.T.S. members
Duration
49:04 minutes
Broadcast Date
December 19, 2019
Jason: Support for A Life of Dogs is brought to you by Royal Canin. Royal Canin offers precise, effective nutrition for dogs based on size, age, breed, and to address specific needs. To learn more about Royal Canin, visit them on the web at royalcanin.com, and by Highland Canine Training, offering professional dog training solutions and premier canine education. Learn more at highlandcanine.com
[RATS Members hunting]
Jason: Thanks for joining us for episode one of our second season. This episode contains curse words and graphic sounds, so if you’re squeamish or have small children, this may not be the episode for you. From A Life of Dogs, I’m Jason Purgason and this is Battle for the Alley.
Greg: My dad tells his story from when he was a cop in the city. They used to take the night-shift rookies down this specific alleyway and you would not be told why you are going down this alleyway, but just that you had to go and see it for yourself. As they turned down this tight corridor, there were two small ledges that ran on both the driver’s side and the passenger side at about head level. The driver would take the spotlight and kick it on and slowly pan from right to left, and when this happened, all of a sudden this onslaught of rats would come running at head level. This terrifies most of the passengers of the squad cars. This alley became known as Rat Alley amongst the cops working the night shift in the city. Meanwhile, it was actually called Ryders Alley and the Ryders Alley that we were standing in front of 30 plus years later looked very different. This particular story begins in this same alley – Ryders Alley – on the lower East side of Manhattan.
[RATS members out on a hunt at night]
Greg: We train police dogs, detection dogs, and search and rescue dogs. That was one of the most impressive displays of working dogs. That was one of the most impressive displays of working dogs I have ever seen.
Richard R.: The name of our group is the Ryders Alley Trencher-fed Society, and it’s cleverly designed to parse the acronym RATS, and it’s been around for about 30 years at this point. So the funny name comes from the fact that back in the old days when dogs – specifically hounds – were hunted in packs. Some of them lived in packs and lived in kennels, in the hunt kennels if you had a few bucks. If you didn’t, the individual hunters kept the dogs and they came only when they were going to hunt those together. They were fed from trenchers and it was called a trencher-fed pack. So that’s where the trencher comes from. A trencher is actually a funny looking wooden bowl. Ryders Alley is pretty simplistic. It’s an alley in lower Manhattan. It actually was the place where the American Revolution started.
The folks that lived in the neighborhood weren’t all that friendly with the British, and they were kind of surly and intractable. So Ryders Alley was a hotbed of revolution and it was also not only the birthplace of the revolution, but the birthplace of rats. Thousands of rats! There’s no way that I can adequately describe to you the amount of rats that used to be in Ryders Alley. If you take a one block street and populate it with thousands of rats, you don’t begin to have an idea how many rats were in that particular alley. People have written books on it. Well, not too far away from there, there was a gentleman by the name of Kit Burns that had a little business establishment that was known as the Rat Pit, and we’ve gotten up to about 1870 at this point. And not very far away from Ryders Alley was Kit Burns’ Rat Pit on Water Street. And as this picture shows you, you had a lot of very high class gentlemen with their top hats willing to part with money, based on how many rats a terrier could kill in a certain amount of time. It actually figured heavily in the development of sports in New York City, but that’s another story for another time.
The record, by the way, was held by a terrier by the name of Billy who killed 100 rats in 6 minutes and 25 seconds. I don’t know how much money transpired in that, but that was it. Well, people have been rat hunting for a long time and it was a family thing, and you see this handsome little kid over here on the side with his rat stick and his shaggy dog. Well, not much has changed. We still have a kid with a rat stick and a shaggy dog, but it’ s a few centuries later and a little different thing. But we’re still operating basically the same way we did back in the old days. Rat catchers have always been the unsung heroes.
Greg: That was Richard Reynolds, the founder of the Ryders Alley Trencher-fed Society. RATS is a group of volunteer terrier-wielding vigilantes who hunt rats throughout the city of New York on most weekends.
Richard R.: Well, I’ve always lived in New York but I’ve always had a country heart and I’ve always been a dog person. I started out to be a veterinarian and realized real early that I didn’t have the heart for that. So I’ve had my dogs, I’ve been involved in dog shows; I’m a dog show judge and travel heavily for that. Terriers are a natural adjunct to fox hunting. When the fox is run to ground by the hounds, the terriers are put down to start the game all over again. So I got in into terriers from that, and then when I gave up the fox hunt, I needed something to do. I lived in New York and we’ve got plenty of rats, so…
Greg: Being dog people is about the only thing that this group has in common. This entire group comes from completely different career paths, highly educated people. These guys are unsuspecting and you would never be able to pick them off the street as these people go out in the middle of the night and chase rats around in the garbage and trash cans.
Richard R.: People ask; how many members do we have? Well, we don’t have any. There are about 65 people on our mailing list and we limit it to eight dogs, so we don’t really know. It comes and goes and some nights are oversubscribed and some nights are slim. Do the RATS people have day jobs? Well, yeah. We’ve got an ER physician, an editor/publisher, veterinarians, tax consultant, vet techs, wine importer, archaeologist, pharmacologist, building superintendent, police chief, security engineer, attorneys, biologist and animal behaviorists among others. So we’re all really a bunch of amateurs. They’re all hardcore dog people though.
Greg: Not everyone in this group gets into it because they know that they’re destined to hunt rats. Some of the members actually got into it by accident. This part of the story comes from Jason Rivera.
Jason Rivera: That’s why I do this. I got into this by accident. A guy sold me this dog and it was killing everything in sight and I was like, what’s wrong? I thought I had a bad dog. So I read up on it, I made some friends and then I saw these guys on TV. I said, well this is perfect. Then Pete threw me on and it turns out we all know the same people. I got this dog from a guy that he knows and he knows this guy and this guy and it’s like a little community of Patterdale Terriers. He helps me out a lot because this guy’s a real dog guy right here. I’m not a dog guy. He’s a dog guy and he’s got a great dog right there. You know, she’s a natural.
Greg: Jason tells the story about how he’s struggling with Koko in a pet home environment because she doesn’t have a job or any form of real mental stimulation, and you hear him say that he thinks that he’s got a bad dog, when in reality he has an ideal candidate for it’s a prime terrier working dog. Patterdale’s are not the only terriers that we saw out on the hunt. We saw a variety of different types of dogs, including a couple of mixes. Here Richard explains the different types of dogs and why they excel at what they do.
Richard R.: Well, a little bit of brit speak for you. When we say working terriers, we’re talking about pursuing quarry underground, and that’s not what we’re doing tonight. We’re pursuing them above ground, so it’s not really working terriers, and the RATS team consists of basically a variety of breeds. We have a Norfolk Terrier, American Hunt Terrier, Jack Russell Terrier, Cairn Terrier, Border Terrier, West Highland White Terrier, Bedlington Terrier, Mountain Feist, Patterdale Terrier, Manchester Terrier, Jagdterrier, and Dachshunds. So you have the whole crew.
A little bit about the breeds here. The Border Terriers, they hunt with a pack and the foot packs are the fells and they have their little thing. Bedlington Terriers were originally bred for poaching. We don’t have one out with us tonight. Jagdterriers are a German creation and we won’t deal with them. You’ll see two of them later on tonight. They’re a device of the devil, and anything bad you can say about a dog, you can say it about the Jagdterrier. If you’re a person, you’re fine. If you’re another dog, you’re fine. Anything else is just naturally got to die. So they are a supreme hunting terrier, but the true working terrier is a combination of basic instinct, training and experience. The basic instinct is bred in training. We use some of the American Kennel Club performance tests, and experience can last from zero to a year before a dog catches on. Sometimes it’s depending on the breed, it’s slow. Dogs’ basic instinct ranges from an alligator, which is the Patterdale and the Jagdterrier, to an absolute couch potato, which are the French Bulldog and the Norwich Terrier.
Sitting here in the middle of about seven of the best Rat Terriers on the face of this earth, and if you’ll notice, a certain few dogs caught most of the rats, but every last one of them was put to him by this one or one of the other short legged guys. So it’s a team effort and one can’t do it without the other.
Greg: Very shortly into the night, it became very apparent that there were two main roles on the hunters that were going on here. And I really wanted to find out what went into the training of these dogs that teach them these roles. In this next part, Richard describes how these roles are established.
Richard R.: The dog will over a period of time pick out a job and you can’t really force them into it. They are what they are and if they’re going to be a ‘catch dog’, then they identify with using their eyes and they are fast. If they’re going to be a ‘push’ dog, all they want to do is use their nose. I’ve got a Bedlington Terrier and the rat can run right in front of him and if he doesn’t smell it, he’s not going to do anything.
[RATS Members hunting]
Greg: A little bit of background information here on the rat issue in New York City. New York City has been deemed the third most rat infested city in all of America, and you may ask the question of “how did it get so bad?” As more and more young people move into the city and gentrify the neighborhoods, the need for expansion is ever increasing.
[On location in New York City]
Greg: Jimmy was just saying that now it’s Brooklyn that has the most rat complaints at any of the boroughs, but as younger and younger crowds move in, the neighborhoods start to get gentrified and they start to expand on the housing that is there. Let’s go taller up, put in underground parking garages. It’s bringing up all these subterranean rats. So now all of a sudden, people are now complaining about rats being there when they never used to complain, and now it’s all of these underground rats are getting pushed to the surface and wreaking havoc, so watch out Brooklyn. Well if you’re in Brooklyn, I’m sure you already know at this point, but we see you. RATS are coming.
Greg: More people means more trash. Rat complaints soared through the roof, increasing by over 25%. The city had to take official action. In 2017, Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a $32 million campaign to reduce the rat population by over 70%. His two main targets were the rats’ food sources and available living habitats. His plan included the purchase of 336 trash cans priced at over $7,000 a piece, $16.3 million to replace the dirt basements of New York City’s public housing buildings with a concrete rat pad. $8.8 million invested into trash compactors to properly store and dispose of waste. Plans were also implemented to improve trash management and pickups, as well as harsher penalties for those who did not follow the rules. De Blasio attempted to fumigate the rat burrows by filling rat holes with dry ice, which only drove the rats elsewhere. His plan was set to finish in the end of 2017. This was sadly not enough. Trash continued to pile up, eventually burying the $7,000 trash cans. We visited the RATS group in December of 2019. The rat population is still visibly abundant.
Richard R: People ask why is it that rats have survived for so many years in every environment known to man. I mean, from China to Sweden to everywhere. Say a pair of rats today, a female rat comes into season every three days and she’s going to get bred. The gestation period is 21 to 23 days. The average litter is 10 to 12 and they reach sexual maturity in five to six weeks. Now, if you’re a little slow on the mathematics, 365 days, 24,000 rats. So the two rats that you take tonight, if they weren’t taken tonight, we get 24,000 a year from them. If you set rat traps, your rate of return on trapping is 4% no matter what kind of trap you set, where you set it, whatever. If you set 100 trips tonight, you’re going to get 4 rats.
[RATS Members hunting]
Jason: When the mission of your organization involves killing other animals, what kind of backlash do you get and what does the community you work in seem to think about what you do? Find out the answers to this and more when we hit the streets of New York City with RATS as our show continues.
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[Music]
[RATS Members hunting]
Richard R.: Well we went for about 20 years, shunning all publicity and we got nowhere very quickly. And when we finally came out of our shell and said, we’re not afraid of backlash anymore, it just kind of took up and we got internationally recognized and it’s been very, very successful. Well, the New York Times did an article on us, a lovely two-page spread, and in the course of doing that, they went to PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment Animals, and asked PETA what they thought of it and PETA said, this is nothing more than a twisted blood sport masquerading as rodent control. And they came back and asked me for rebuttal and I said, yeah, sounds about right. So that was the end of that discussion.
[RATS Members hunting]
Woman
Greg: Literally, every single person I come in contact with on the street, this is not just like a coincidence or one to two people know about these people. Literally every single pedestrian, passer-by, civilian that we see, every single one of them, are you the rat people? You guys are the ones with the rat dogs? Every single person out here knows who these guys are and they’re like legends. Infamous rat people of New York City. It’s unbelievable.
Richard R.: How does the public feel about our murderous forays? They’re our biggest champion. And people say “why can’t I just take my dog and go kill rats in New York City?” Try it. We have a tremendous support base, and if somebody comes along and we’re hunting busily, we stop hunting and let the dogs go play with the people. They’re more important to us than killing a couple rats. We have a good reputation. We want to preserve it.
[On location in New York City]
Male Public: Absolutely applaud what you guys are doing, because this area has this huge rat problem. I had to come in here, I don’t know how many months ago and deal with a mouse climbing on my girlfriend’s wall, scaring the entire family. I had to deal with that.
Greg: Meaning in the actual apartment?
Male Public: Yeah. And in this construction like a thousand times or so.
[RATS Members talking to members of the public]
Richard R.: We don’t get a lot of backlash and there are a number of reasons for that. The things that people do to rats are barbaric by my standards. A sticky trap that allows the rat to die over a 72 hour period is in my book, cruel. Poison. Oh, great. You feed the rat the poison. It takes two weeks to build up in the body and then the rat very slowly bleeds to death internally. Well, before you pick on me and my terriers, let’s get the guys that are killing them the other way, so that mitigates some of the backlash. Would I want to be terrier bait? No, but if you gave me a choice of three ways to go, I’ll take the dogs.
Greg: Richard brings up an interesting point here about the lesser of three evils. When we think of rat terriers, we don’t oftentimes think about them working in the context of city streets, but in reality these are the same dogs that have been bred for hundreds of years for a specific working purpose, and they are extremely good at that job. Getting out and watching these dogs do the job on the streets was one of the coolest things that I’ve ever gotten to experience as a dog trainer. It’s really interesting to see literal hundreds of years of domestication come into play in a back alley somewhere in the projects of Manhattan. It was an incredible opportunity, and as far as working dogs go, it was one of the most impressive demonstrations I’ve seen in my entire career.
[RATS Members hunting]
Greg: As our night began, it became readily apparent that we were not going to be hunting for rats in abandoned industrial complexes and back alleys. Where we found ourselves were in city parks where children were supposed to be playing and in apartment complexes where people lived. We were very close to the public. If you stood still long enough and looked down the sidewalk, sooner or later you’d catch a glimpse of a rat crossing the street. They were not afraid of humans. They were not afraid to show themselves. They were there.
Richard R.: So yeah, I have a fairly warped outlook on life at this point and I look for rat holes. I look for rat infestations and I see rats where the average person won’t. I was talking to one lady with one of the community gardens and she said, well, I’m sorry, there are no rats here tonight, and I’m looking around. The trees are full of them. The bushes are full of them. This lady can’t see them.
Greg: Spotting the rats became something that you could not unsee. Once you had that lens pulled over your eye, there was no going back. You can tell that these guys had experience as we were walking around with them because they knew exactly where the rats would be and the paths that they would take. The group travels all over. They’re not restricted to just the Island of Manhattan. They go to other parts of New York, as well as different cities.
[RATS Members hunting]
Richard R.: What you’re looking for is the success story and we claim it as failure, because once we clean out an area, we can’t hunt there anymore. So what you’re asking me to do is to itemize the places we don’t hunt anymore, and I wish I could lay claim to removing or managing all the rats. We can’t. The variety of reasons, we’re only an infinitesimal part of it. We began hunting in Liberty State Park, which is on the Jersey side of New York Harbor, and we hunted there at the request of their superintendent for years, and we just happily did about a four mile walk and cleaned out the trash cans and had a fine old time. And on 9/11/2001 things changed here, and that park became a morgue for the victims of the World Trade Center so we didn’t hunt there anymore.
We went to Ellis Island and hunted there for a while, but well eventually you manage the rats and you talk yourself out of business. So at that point we came to New York in quest of places and there was an author by the name of Robert Sullivan that said, well, why don’t you try a couple of these places? And he directed us to some absolutely lovely hunting grounds. But as time goes on, these places become gentrified and cleaned up and that’s what happened down there. So we moved up town and now we go a little bit all over the place. We ranged from Boston to Washington, and we have a splinter group in Washington DC and we have a splinter group in Boston, but we go and help them out every now and then.
Greg: To put things in perspective here, this is not your average kitchen mouse that we are talking about. The largest rat they had caught in the past was over 850 grams. That’s close to two pounds. These two-pound monster rats can be up to 11 inches long, excluding the tail and they’re not going down without a fight. This is where the human element comes in because even the most experienced dogs need some help sometimes.
[RATS Members hunting]
Greg: Help from humans came in a variety of different forms. For example, one of the members, Bill would go out up ahead and scope out the areas that the dogs would be hunting, and place strategic cardboard blockers to keep the rats from traveling down the predicted escape routes. These cardboard blockers would give the dogs an extra half second to grab the rat before it escaped. Other help came in the form of shaking trash bins or kicking trash bags. Some of the kicks were a little bit more unconventional than others.
[RATS Members hunting]
Greg: Each new location that they went to, they would come up with a new customized plan of attack. Its exit routes were covered. Entryways were covered. There was a dog for every inch of ground that the rats would travel. Both humans and dogs made every effort to catch every single rat they could before they got away, oftentimes dogs catching more than one rat.
[RATS Members hunting]
Greg: Public disgust and fear of rats dates back to the dark ages when they were a major carrier of the bubonic plague. Modern day rats are no cleaner. They are just as much a carrier of disease and viruses as they were back then. Which raises the question, are they still worried about rat-borne illnesses being transferred to the dogs in this day and age?
Richard R.: Are we afraid of disease? Well, yeah. We have rampant leptospirosis in New York City, and lepto by its nature morphs itself about every 20 minutes. So there’s a vaccine out that theoretically protects against 4 sero-vars of lepto where there are more than 260 known. So there’s no real way you can prevent exposure, and the dogs fortunately pick up a natural immunity very quickly. So when our dogs go into the vet, we get ‘oh, your dog showing lepto antibodies.’ We know. They carry a natural immunity so we’ve never had a sick dog in 30 years. On the other hand, if we see signs of lepto … lepto moves in waves, just like the rats do and if we see signs, then we go hunt somewhere else.
Greg: The other interesting thing that talking to Richard made me think about was how being out here, and it’s kind of exposing the dogs to small, small amounts of leptospirosis is having these dogs build up a natural immunity. Is there a way that taking blood samples from these dogs that have this natural immunity? They can create more accurate vaccines and not just guesswork because again, leptospirosis is kind of like the flu, where the vaccines for that season, they kind of guess on these four or five are going to be the most popular. So… food for thought.
Greg: It’s impressive that in over 30 years of doing this, Richard hasn’t had one dog on his team gets sick, but that’s not to say this line of work doesn’t come with its own set of hazards.
[RATS Members talking about dog hazards].
Greg: One of the questions we had early on was after a night of going around and hunting rats, what do you do with all of the dead that you collect? Do you leave them where you found them? Do you bring them with you? Do you taxidermy them and add them to some sort of weird collection? In this next clip, Richard tells exactly what he does.
Richard R.: What do we do with the dead rats? Well, sometimes we freeze them and feed them to our falconer friends. They feed the birds in the winter with them. Some go to Fordham for further study. We think it’s kind of neat; the 18th century terrier work supports 21st century science research. And we participated with Fordham University in a study to try and determine the rat reservoirs in the city and the migration patterns of rats when they left the reservoirs. We provided their DNA samples so they were trying to trap them getting nothing. We would give them 60, 70 rat samples a night, and so we had a long and wonderful friendship. Still do. We also have provided DNA samples to Columbia University in disease studies and everything else, and one of you will have the joy of carrying the rat bag tonight.
[RATS Members hunting]
Greg: When we were first introduced to the rat bag, we had many questions as to what it actually was and it needs very little explanation. It’s literally a reusable grocery bag that the group collects and places their dead rats in, and that’s the rat bag and it’s throughout the night we became very familiar with the rat bag.
[On location hunting in New York City]
RATS Member: The rat bag is getting heavy.
Greg: At this point in our story, you may be asking yourself, what on earth would motivate these people to do something like this? The answer is simpler than you would expect. The group has made it its goal to preserve the working characteristics of many terrier breeds. And as you will hear, they are 100% dedicated to this cause.
RATS Member: The reason I got my female was to breed him to her, because I waited a long time to find the blood I want, so he’s frozen so I’m not breeding her till she’s four. I want to make sure she got a lot more work to put in before she has a litter, and you always want to wait on a bitch if you can for a couple of years. You want to make sure everything’s sound, health wise. So I have him collected at least seven times. I’ve got enough for about 15 litters so he’ll be long dead and I can still breed her.
Richard R.: People ask why we do it. Well the secret is that we do it to identify and preserve the unique working qualities of the terrier breeds. We’re all dog people. It’s not what sells. Dead rats sell. So we’re shamelessly using the fact that we’re hunting rats in an urban environment to promote the working abilities of the dogs themselves. It’s where we’re coming from. Some of us are dog show people and we get a bad rap of doing evil things in our breeding of dogs and so forth, but the fact of the matter is that we’re right out there in the trenches trying to preserve the working qualities of these breeds.
[RATS Members hunting]
Greg: From the crew here at A Life of Dogs, we would just like to take a moment to talk about the members of the group and the amount of credit that they deserve for what they do. This is a group of unpaid volunteers that dedicates their nights and weekends to not only lowering the rat population of the streets of New York City, but also furthering and preserving terrier breeds as a whole. They welcomed us with open arms and showed us one hell of a good time. We would like to thank you for all of your service to both the canine and the human community. A warning to all rats in New York City – you may be able to stomach the poison, outsmart the traps, but eventually these guys will find you.
Richard R.: Let’s face it. What we do is fun. It’s fun for us. It’s fun for the dogs.
RATS Members: That’s a crazy hobby, man, but it is fun. It’s exciting. Hunting is good, no matter what level,
Jason: This episode was produced by Jason Purgason, Erin Purgason, Greg Vaughn and Abby Trogdon. Our website is www.alifeofdogs.com. Support for this episode of A Life of Dogs comes from Royal Canin. Learn more at www.royalcanin.com. We want to send out a special thanks to Richard Reynolds, Bill Reyna, Jimmy Hoffman, Jason Rivera, Eli Will and the rest of the RATS crew for inviting us behind the scenes and sharing their stories with us. We hope you enjoyed episode one of our second season. Our crew here has really put in a ton of work to make this second season even better than the first. When we talked about first doing this story and I told the crew that we were headed to New York, their response was…. hey, buddy. Yo, that mother fucker’s big!
Jason: I’m Jason Purgason. Be sure to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcast, and stay tuned for episode two of our second season where we share more stories of A Life of Dogs.
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