The season’s last run ended in minus eighteen. My lead dog Basin, a ten-year-old Malamute, was still breathing hard when a visitor reached toward her face. I said stop before I finished the sentence.
A dog that has just run is not the same animal as a dog at rest. The cardiovascular system is still elevated and stress hormones have not cleared. The threshold for a defensive response is much lower than it will be an hour later.
On May 22nd, a two-year-old was bitten near the neck during a Disney Alaska cruise excursion run by Gold Rush Dog Sleds. The family was told by the guide that it was safe for the toddler to pet the dog immediately after a run. A verbal assurance from a guide is not a safety assessment.
The label family-friendly on a sled dog excursion is a marketing decision. It is not made by someone who has read the dog. It is made by someone who has read the booking calendar.
Reading a working dog after a run requires watching specific things. You look at the ears, the set of the jaw, the way weight distributes across the feet. A dog leaning forward with tight facial muscles is not a dog inviting contact.
The dogs I run in January, when temperatures hold at minus twenty for weeks, are not the same animals in a warm September setting. Sustained cold work changes the physiological baseline. A dog accustomed to running serious distances in serious conditions is not built for casual interaction with strangers. It does not always signal that discomfort in ways a non-reader will recognize.
Tellington TTouch teaches handlers to notice the quality of tension in a dog’s body before making contact. This is not a supplementary skill. It is the skill that prevents what happened in Alaska.
I have watched guides at commercial operations tell visitors a dog was safe to touch when the dog’s body was saying something entirely different. The guide was not lying. The guide simply could not read what the dog was communicating, which is worse than lying.
Gold Rush Dog Sleds ran the excursion. No mandatory waiting period between run and contact has been reported. No one is reporting that the guide assessed the dog’s state before the child reached toward it. That is three points of failure stacked on top of each other, not one mistake.
Every commercial operation will tell you the waiver covers them. The waiver does not change what happened to the child’s neck. What protects the child is a protocol that keeps a two-year-old at a safe distance from a post-run dog, regardless of what the guide believes.
My protocol is twenty minutes minimum between the end of a run and any visitor contact. For children under ten, I stay within arm’s reach for the entire interaction. I do not delegate that call to anyone else.
The sled dog tourism industry has a financial incentive to present working dogs as approachable and gentle at all times. That is not an accurate picture of working dogs. A dog that is excellent at its job is not necessarily a dog that is safe for a toddler to touch at the wrong moment.
The visitor who came closest to being bitten at my kennel was not a child. It was a retired veterinarian who was completely confident and completely wrong about what the dog in front of her was communicating. Credentials do not substitute for paying attention.
The Disney situation will generate forum posts and commentary, and then next season’s excursions will run much the same way. Change requires operators to build in the time and the protocols, which costs money and slows throughput. That is a real cost, and the industry will need to decide whether it is willing to pay it.
Working dogs are not props for a premium excursion package. A toddler’s proximity to a post-run team is not a risk that any verbal assurance can accurately assess. The operators who understand this build the protocols. The ones who do not are waiting for their version of May 22nd.
The interval between the last stride and the first hand on the dog is not a scheduling problem. It is the safety decision, and it should be made by someone who can read the dog, not by someone who needs the booking to go well.
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.
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