Siberian huskies are Northwest suburban ambassadors to Iditarod
When the Iditarod, the great Alaskan dog sled race, kicks off on March 8, it will have a new set of interested fans in Arlington Heights, thanks to local members of a Siberian husky rescue group spanning northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin.
Mike and Noel Dagley from Adopt-A-Husky Inc. took their seven huskies to The Moorings senior citizen community recently, where they enthralled a packed house.
The Iditarod is run each March from Anchorage to Nome. Each team of 12 to 16 dogs and their musher cover more than 1,150 miles in 10 to 17 days.
Racing dogs consume 12,000 calories a day, but according to the official race Web site, www.iditarod.com, mushers all have individual menus for feeding the dogs. Also, some teams run in daylight, some at night. And each musher has an individual training schedule and his or her own ideas on dog care and stamina.
Each team must have arctic parkas, a heavy sleeping bag, an ax, snowshoes, musher food, dog food and boots for each dog's feet to protect against cutting ice and snow injuries, the site explains.
But other than that, they are on their own. Mushers change position, pull ahead, fall behind, take breaks of varying lengths. Just because a team is in the lead one minute doesn't mean it will be leading the next minute.
The Dagleys' dogs have never raced, but the Dagleys have volunteered twice at the race, helping veterinarians who care for dogs that have to drop out because of exhaustion, illness or injury.
"If we wanted our dogs to run, we would have to send them to a handler in Alaska because we don't have the right training conditions here in Illinois," Noel said.
Instead, the Dagleys use dogs they have been rescuing for 12 years for demonstrations at schools, senior citizen facilities and winter events like parades and sledding demonstrations. They enter the dogs in agility and obedience events and trained some of them as therapy dogs.
"We keep them very busy," she said.
At presentations like the recent one at The Moorings, the Dagleys show their audiences a brief video on the Iditarod and its history. They also exhibit photos they took of the mushers on the trail, the various checkpoints and Alaskan scenery.
Then they show a sample sled, the harnesses and booties the dogs wear and the dogs themselves.
A self-professed "animal freak," Moorings resident Mary Lou DeBoer said she learned a lot about the race, its origins and the dogs.
"The dogs were so beautiful and loving and well-behaved,"DeBoer added. "I was really impressed."
"I expected the dogs to be bigger and have thicker, bushier fur. But they average only 50 pounds," added Dorothy Evans, a longtime Arlington Heights resident who moved to The Moorings recently. "They told us, though, that the dogs are capable of pulling three times their own weight."
Evans was also fascinated to learn that the booties the dogs wear are fairly lightweight and are not used for warmth, but for protection from the harsh snow and ice through which the dogs run.
"I didn't know that these dogs are bred to run - that it is in their DNA," added Charlotte Baumgartner, another resident. "They said that if a particular dog isn't picked to run in a race, it is actually brokenhearted."