Trouble In Husky Paradise

Trouble In Husky Paradise
Feb 16th 2009
wolfmoonsleddog
Midwest
Location: Finland, MN
Time - 7:54pm
Temperature: 24 degrees F
Conditions: Cloudy with snow flurries
Forecast: Snow showers tonight and tomorrow. Highs in the 20s, lows in the single digits

It has been a very bizarre week at MCK. I’ve been writing up a Beargrease journal, which I will get up soon but first I will tell a little bit of what has been going on, for those of you who don’t know already.

First, the awful weather.

A week ago we had an ice storm of sorts. It rained. This is February…it’s not supposed to rain! That’s Georgia weather, not Minnesota weather! The rain froze all over the snow and the hard-packed areas (the kennel, for instance) were all coated with a coating of ice. Trying to do chores became treacherous and I kept falling just walking around the kennel. Even the dogs were slipping. It was awful. Fortunately Blake and Jen let me borrow some cleats for my boots so I was able to have at least some traction on the ice.

Then it warmed up. This was good because it got rid of the slippery ice but bad because it turned it to slush. To top it off, it kept raining.

Strange weather, to be sure, but the strangest thing was that the weather was the least of our concerns. Some of the dogs seemed more tired than was normal and, to make a long story short, Jen ran some bloodwork on a lot of the dogs and we were horrified to discover that they were anemic.

This was terrible news and especially disturbing because we didn’t know what was causing it. There was no connection between dogs who had run the Beargrease and dogs who had been resting. Only the non-race dogs (puppies and retired sled dogs) seemed okay. This suggested something to do with diet, since the non-race dogs are fed different food than the race dogs.

Whatever the cause, it was a definite problem. Blake has withdrawn from the 2009 Iditarod and Jen from the UP 200.

To make another long story short, we now believe the dogs were suffering from too much vitamin A - from a variety of sources but especially beaver liver. The race dogs have eaten a lot of beaver meat this year. It comes in large frozen blocks which contain a lot of liver.

We haven’t gotten the final results but expect to in the next day or so. We have cut out beaver meat and a race meat mix that contains a lot of vitamin A. The dogs seem to be getting better so, depending on how the next bloodwork looks, Blake and Jen may run the Can-Am 250 at the end of this month and Blake is thinking about entering the Hudson Bay Quest in late March. And I still plan to run the Wolftrack 60.

On a different note, we have started working more with the soon-to-be-yearling puppies. More on this soon!