Swimming with the Dogs

We've been taking groups (males/females) of dogs swimming at a private spot on Lake Superior almost daily during the week.  Well, we do most of the swimming, they usually do this:

Watch from the rocks.

Elliot using his snorkle and mask while the dogs look on.

We do throw them in some times, but really wish they'd just swim on there own.  Good exercise that won't overheat them and it would wash some of the dust out of their fur.  Of course, we discovered that we do have one water dog:

Actually, before I had the camera this day, Brian had only swam like once since we've been bringing them here this spring, but on this day, he swam a lot, getting in the water and swimming to each of us (me, Jeremy, and Elliot) over and over again.  He must have wanted his picture taken.  He also got special attention every time he swam, with no competition with other dogs because no one else would get in the water.  Afterward, his fur was so nice and bright, clean, and soft!  We are planning on having him around when we take the new pups to the lake when they are about eight weeks or so, in hopes that they will learn to like swimming as much as Brian seems to.

Jeremy's trying to convince some of the other dogs that swimming is fun.

Puppy Names

We settled on names for the puppies, who are about five weeks old now, with a tiny bit of compromise...

 The theme is officially Sons of Anarchy- a t.v. show that we enjoy, and the compromise is Clayton.  One of the characters on the show is named Clay, but Elliot wanted to name this pup after a video game character he likes named Clayton (from Gears of War), so he's named Clayton but will probably be called Clay for short. 

Disappointment

We took a ride today on one of the roads nearby that we use for truck training in the fall and sledding in the winter-lots of nice hills to build muscle on the dogs.  This is what we found:

We were shocked as this is a through road that has been in common use by hunters and other people who have cabins on this road.  We knew the land is private, but as far as we know, it has been used by the public for years and years.  This road is only about a five mile drive or so from our house and now we can't use it-puts a bit of  damper on fall training for sure.  Its getting tougher and tougher to find decent training near our house.  We really wish we lived closer to Marenisco and the miles and miles of good trails we have found over there!

Puppy Video

Updates

First, an update on the pups.  They had their first soaked kibble the other day-at just over three weeks old:

At first, a few of them didn't quite get it.

But they figured it out pretty quick.

Taking a nap after their meal on day three of kibble.

Brute-the brown guy here, and the last of the pups from earlier this summer-checking the new pups out.

Starting to play...

With mom-they're getting pretty big!

Brute getting in on some of the pup's food.

We've decided on names, and I will be doing a separate post on that soon.

We also had something else good for our kennel happen recently.  We have a new kennel supporter!  He is a friend of Jeremy's and a great welder.
 We have had a hard time finding snow hooks that we really like-a snow hook is like a parking brake for a sled-you hook it down into the snow (hopefully hard packed) when you stop if you need to stop for any period of time to get off the sled, etc.  The hooks that we've been using have been unreliable at best, and just plain useless at worst.  Our friend Matt, who we did some training with last winter, has a snow hook that we were jealous of.  He was reliably hooking down with 12 dogs on the line and no problems.  It turns out this particular snow hook came from Alaska and the company has no website or anything-Matt has friends that know people that lined it up for him. 
 So Jeremy thought to ask this welder friend if he would be able to basically duplicate this design.  He said he could, so we borrowed Matt's hook for a pattern and a couple weeks later, we now have two new snow hooks that are not quite exactly the same-he and Jeremy put their heads together and made a couple minor changes to the design, but the results are amazing and we CANNOT wait to try them out!  He gave us a crazy good deal on them and we can't thank him enough.  It may not seem like much to him because he's so good at what he does, but this means a great deal to a kennel on a limited budget-everything counts and this is a big thing!

They are not painted yet-we are going to look into having them powder coated.  One of the things we really love is that they weigh about half of what our old hooks weigh, but they are still strong!

Puppy update

The newest pups are growing fast and are two and a half weeks old now.  We are still not sure on names yet, tossing around the idea of a Sons of Anarchy (t.v. show) theme, but Elliot wants a video game character theme, so no final decisions yet.

Female-the biggest pup in the litter.

Female.

Female-the kids think she's marked like a cow.

Male-love his black spots!

Male-looks the most like his dad.

Male-the smallest in the litter.

Male.

The cow marked female trying to cool off a bit-its been extremely warm here-upper 80's when these pics were taken.

The kids have been pretty busy playing with pups this summer and doing a great job.  There's worse ways to spend a summer...

The remaining two of the litter from earlier this summer-the rest have been sold.  They are now 12 weeks old.  The kids did a good job helping raise them.

More Puppies!

  As occasionally happens when you have a kennel of 25 or so dogs, we ended up with an unplanned litter of husky pups today.  Of course, we knew she was pregnant, but we didn't breed her on purpose, and I know that sounds bad, but what happened was that one of the males got loose in the yard at just the right time.  We are not really unhappy about it, though, because the father is our 14 year old Eric Morris bred dog that we had been hoping to get one more litter with, but hadn't totally settled on who the mother would be.  He decided for us.  The mother is actually one of our pups from last summer, Breeze, who only just turned one on the 25th, so she is actually way younger than we would have liked and also hasn't had a chance to prove herself much in harness yet, but she did do a great job on the couple of hookups that she did have.  We have had a similar thing happen once before, seven years ago, where the mother was under one year old, and that breeding produced our best lead dog, Thunder, and the father happens to be the same dog. 
  So, long story short, we have five new, perfect looking pups so far as of this post-three girls and two boys:

Our whelping shed-first time doing it this way, but perfect for the 80 plus degree days we are having.