There were six inches of fresh snow on the ground and Mack was moving wrong. Not lame, not favoring anything, just moving without purpose, which in a worki
Author: Helen Corlew
Helen Corlew
Helen L. Corlew runs a team of Samoyeds, Alaskan malamutes and Alaskan huskies. I am a Tellington TTouch practitioner and use this mode of work with training and living with my dogs. Helen Corlew founded Prairie Isle Dog Trekking in Petersburg, North Dakota in 2010, and has spent the fifteen years since doing something most people only read about: teaching real dog sledding on real prairie terrain, at the edge of a landscape that doesn't apologize for being difficult. She is not a weekend enthusiast. She harnesses working dogs in January cold, trains handlers who have never touched a sled, and has built one of the only hands-on mushing education programs on the Northern Great Plains — from a single address on Highway 2, with no marketing budget and no shortcuts. Her writing on Prairie Isle Dog Trekking reflects the same philosophy. Whether she is covering trail safety across the Rockies, breed behavior in extreme conditions, or what it actually takes to trek with a dog in the Alps, Helen writes from the position of someone who has done the work before writing the sentence. She lives and runs dogs in Nelson County, North Dakota. Kindly follow me on Social Media!
Rook ate a harness clip last February. Not the webbing, just the clip, and I only found out because he was moving wrong through the gangline, favoring his
The harness I pulled off Kestrel this morning smelled like frozen nylon and old work. It’s been outside since Tuesday. Temperatures haven’t climbed above s
The dog came in on a Tuesday with a family from Bottineau, a Shiba Inu, and I knew before they got out of the truck that nobody had told them what they wer
The sound a dog makes when the tug line goes slack is not dramatic. It’s just an absence. One moment there’s tension in the line and the next there isn’t,
The frozen nylon smell hit me before I got the shed door fully open, that particular cold that means something was left out overnight that shouldn’t have b
The tug line went slack mid-run and I knew before I looked that Fenwick had pulled up lame. Dropped out of his harness rhythm so quietly that the other dog
The harness smelled like frozen nylon and old sweat when I pulled it off the hook that morning, the smell that means the temperature dropped overnight fast
Hiking with a rescue dog requires behavioral assessment, gradual trail conditioning, and gear matched to the dog’s unknown physical history. A 2020 study by the ASPCA found that rescue dogs introduced to structured outdoor activity within 60 days of adoption show 34% faster behavioral stabilization than rescue dogs confined to indoor routines during the same period.What Is Hiking With a Rescue Dog?Hiking with a rescue dog is the activity of taking a formerly sheltered, abandoned, or rehomed dog on outdoor trails, with additional preparation for behavioral unpredictability, unknown health history, and limited socialization experience. Rescue dogs differ from purpose-bred hiking…
The thing about a dog that greets every stranger like a reunion is that you can’t tell when it’s running on empty. Scout did this. Third dog I ever kept fo