Team Work

The day after my last post I received the dog team equipment, 4 Harnesses, One 4 dog gangline and a shock cord. I tried the harnesses on the dogs and found out that Pepper was a little more over weight than I anticipated and her harness could have been a size larger but hopefully if this works out she will drop a few pounds. Sadie's harness was a little large which I planned on since she should grow into it very quickly. I took them out two at a time Storm with Lizzy and Pepper with Sadie. Storm and Lizzy worked out fine they are close to the same size and can move at the same speed. Storm knows the commands required to do this (left,right, go and whooa) and Izzy will follow. Later I tried other combinations like Storm and Sadie shown above.

Pepper and Sadie were another story. They are near the same size and Pepper knows all the commands however Sadie was more interested in grabbing Pepper by the harness then walking with her. I did manage to get them to go ahead of me like Storm and Lizzy did which is all I wanted to accomplish on their first outing. On our next outing I will add a weight for them to drag. I figure it will take about a week to get them used to pulling the weight.

It is now 2 days later and I am ready to try pulling some weight. I would have preferred to have them pull and old tire but since I did not have one I had to find something else. It so happened that I was raking leaves so I raked them on to a tarp and had them drag the tarp to the back of the property. I did this in teams of two, Sadie with Storm and Pepper with Lizzy. Both teams had no trouble pulling the tarp full of leaves the few hundred feet required to take them from my front yard to the compost pile in the back. I then tried them in a team of 4. This was a little more difficult but so far training them to pull has been one of the easiest things that I have taught them. They are progressing much faster than I anticipated.

Now that I know they have no trouble with the harness and no trouble pulling weight, at least in teams of two, the next step was to start increasing the distance and combining them into a team of 4. Since I still did not have anything for them to pull I took out an old plastic dog crate and hooked it up to the gangline. I had to determine what order to hook up the dogs so I decided to try it by intellegence this time. Storm and Pepper in front with Lizzy and Sadie behind. I figured that since Storm and Pepper were the most educated I could control them better. Lizzy and Sadie would just follow. Besides Storm already knew left and right and I could control him better than the others.


Well off we went. I am sure that the neighbors thought I was nuts. Here I go down the street running beside 4 dogs pulling a crate banging and scraping along the pavement. My planned layout quickly went out the window when Lizzy and Sadie took off, passed Storm and Pepper and instead of having 2 dogs in front and 2 in back I ended up with 4 dogs blocking the whole street with Lizzy and Sadie pulling the crate by them selves while Strom and Pepper ran beside them. Back to the drawing board.

Next time Field Trip