kibble and bits

Before I started keeping sled dogs, the feeding of dogs was a simple equation. We bought dry kibble. I put some in a bowl. The dog ate the kibble. If the dog got fat, it got less food. There was water in a bowl, and if the dog wanted water it drank some. Simple. The dynamics of feeding & watering sled dogs seem at this point to be exponentially more complicated. This has been emphasized by the recent cold snap, my concurrent illness and a conversation with a sprint musher down the street.

I am feeding our dogs Eagle Pack Power, both because I have been feeding our pet dogs Eagle Pack Adult food for years and because I know that several well respected distance mushers use Eagle Pack Power for their teams. When the dogs first arrived, I looked at the handy weight-to-food chart on the Power bag and started dishing up kibble accordingly. The dogs were lean when I got them. Dottie was a touch on the skinny side, so she got about a quarter cup extra at each meal. In addition to their food, they were getting chicken-baited water after runs as well as some little chunks of frozen chicken and occasionally fish as post-run snacks on days we increased mileage significantly.They seemed to be holding their weight once we started running in the early season's warmer temperatures, so I didn't make any adjustments to this regimen.

The outside dogs' food is soaked in hot water, and this is their primary source of water since any left outside would quickly freeze. I had looked up how much water working huskies should be getting daily and thought I was in the clear with this amount. Also, this was the routine I had used (based on another musher's input) last year and it had worked out fine inasmuch as the dogs stayed healthy & ran well all season.

I had an inkling of things to come when I attended the Alaska Dog Mushing Association's Sled Dog Symposium this fall. Not only was the keynote presentation about the science and recent research around nutrition & feeding, but this subject was the featured forum and was brought up and discussed, at length, at every single lecture or forum I attended, without exception, for the entire weekend.

A conversation with a competitive mushing neighbor of mine last month brought my whole routine into question. I first got worried when she said I should be watering my team once a day in addition to meals regardless of our run status, and then again after any run. She also hinted that my food-to-water ratio was too high and all the nutrition was washing right through them.

She also questioned my food-brand choice, recommending that I switch to a "better" competitive brand formulated by mushers. The one, of course, that she uses. She was also horrified by the amount I was feeding and told me to double it immediately, especially for Dottie who so far hadn't responded with any significant weight gain to her larger meals. She also warned that my chicken-treats were making the dog's diet protein-heavy and that I needed to balance it out with some fat, but also said that she feeds each of her dogs a pound of meat a day in addition to (soaked) dry food. She recommended a bucket of fat-supplement available at the mushing store be given twice a day with meals, especially with the cold weather coming on. She also showed me two different wormers and some other supplemental powders that could be added to the mix. I ate all this advice up like candy, but like too much candy it left me a little queasy.

At the end of our conversation, she loaned me The Speed Mushing Manual. The first (and longest) chapter warns that feeding is the most important component of dog driving, that every musher is a zealot when it comes to feeding their own team and none of them, even the top competitors running neck in neck in the same races, do it exactly the same way. He then spent the first third of the book exclusively discussing food.

All this information coincided with the sudden deep cold snap, and I panicked. I know enough about physiology to know that dehydration hinders metabolism, and the thought that the outside-dogs were chronically dehydrated and therefore chronically cold was distressing. I started watering once a day, and twice a day when we ran. I started to worry that my baited water was too heavy on bait, and was dehydrating them instead of helping. I doubled their food. I bought a tub of lard and started melting an ice-cream scoop's worth into their meals. As the air got colder, the scoops got bigger. I started wondering about supplements and different types of meat.

Then I got sick and it got colder and we didn't run for two weeks.

When I put the dogs in harness again this week, the difference was ... remarkable. Dottie was no longer distressingly skinny, but borderline chunky. Leo and Sawyer were downright fat. Sawyer's harness, which was on the small side to begin with, barely fit her. I started out with slow, short runs for the first two days back, watching them carefully. They didn't seem to be suffering at all from their sudden weight gain and long rest. We did nearly fourteen flat miles today, averaging between seven and eight miles per hour, and all three of my fat-camp huskies were pulling hard and running smooth all the way home. I'm cutting down slightly now that things are warmer, but don't want to swing too far in the other direction because we are putting miles down again and the dogs will be burning more and more calories as we do.

I'm not sure where to go from here. I am no nutritionist, and I have no idea how to manage all these different components, much less their attendant advice. Also, we are not a racing team. We are doing slow, low mileage runs on relatively easy terrain with an empty sled just four or five days a week. These dogs are tough as nails, and have run tens of thousands of miles on all kinds of different types & combinations of food. I doubt I will hurt them too much as I make infinite minor adjustments to their diet (and scoop the attending - and recently doubled - output) but I am still managing to come up with plenty of worry.