If Malamutes are bigger, why do people use huskies for sledding?
Or why would you mix huskies and malamutes on one team?
Powered by Yahoo! Answers
Comments
6 Responses to “If Malamutes are bigger, why do people use huskies for sledding?”Speak Your Mind
Tell us what you're thinking...and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
Malamutes were bred to haul heavy loads very slowly. They are large and heavily muscled. Huskies are smaller, leaner, and faster. They were bred to haul light loads very quickly. It wouldn’t make much sense to mix them, as it would actually decrease both breeds’ effectiveness for their individual purpose.
Because huskies are faster. It’s the same reason that belgian horses are used by the amish for farming and standardbreds are used at the racetrack for harness racing. Today most of the heavy freight work that Malamutes excelled at is done by machines and sledding is primarily recreational. Recreational sledding means races…and huskies are much faster over shorter distances. While there’s no reason why you couldn’t mix malamutes and huskies in the same team, most people that do sledding have a particular preference for the type of dog they use and will stick with one type over the other.
Good answer on the first part, but it does make sense to mix them in one team, and lots of people do. Having two malamutes at wheel takes a lot of weight off of the Siberians in front of them, so the Siberians can run longer and faster. The Mals do bring the team speed down, but its all a matter of balancing. If they weren’t there, the Siberians would tire faster, and with the Siberians help on the weight, the malamutes can go faster. It is a mutual appreciation thing. Of course, most of the time it isn’t that theoretical. A good dog is a good dog, and most sled doggers don’t care if they have a golden retriever in harness if it can do the job the best (of course thats pretty unlikely because a golden would get really cold, really fast, but you get my point). They pick their best dogs more than anything, to take a wonderful quote from the movie Apollo 13 “I don’t care about what it was made to do, I care about what it can do!” I have no doubt that some Siberians are stronger than some malamutes, and some malamutes are faster than some Siberians.
Huskies were developed to move light loads quickly. Mals were developed as draft animals to hual heavy loads at a slower speed. Most mushers use both on their teams.
Actually most people don’t have purebred huskies or malamutes on their dog teams.
They mix the back dogs (or wheelers) with husky/malamutes because of the huskies endurance and the malamutes strength as the back dogs are pulling most of the weight.
Middle/lead dogs tend to be husky/collie mixes because it gives them the huskies endurance, the collies speed, and muscle to match. It also gives them the drive to be stubborn and not quit at what they are doing – pulling a heavy weight. Very few teams i have seen are all pure-bred husky.
Hope it helped!
You’ve gotten some good answers — basically, Malamutes are slow dogs built for draft pulling, and Siberians are bred for pulling light loads at moderate speeds over long distances.
Other answers about mixing the two breeds on a team are wrong. You’d never use Malamute wheel dogs on a Siberian team (unless it was a very slow, unconditioned Siberian team) because the Mals would not be able to keep up with the Siberians.
There is no point in running Siberian x Malamute mixes, because all you and up with in that cross is dogs that are too heavy to be fast, but too small and light-boned to be very strong. There would be no point.
Many people in North America still run purebred Siberian and purebred Malamute teams. There will be two Siberian teams competing in the 2008 Iditarod, and I know that a Mal team has run that race before. There will also be a Siberian team, I think, in the 2008 Yukon Quest.
However, the Siberian has been surpassed, at this point, by the Alaskan Husky — not a mix of Siberian and Collie (I can’t think how that cross would benefit anyone, the coats would be terrible), but a broad mixture of Siberians, Native Village Dogs, Pointers, Salukis, Whippets, Setters, and Greyhounds. Modern technology (and warming climate trends) have made it so that short-haired sled dogs can survive on the trail, and bad feet can be bootied. So now it’s all about speed, rather than endurance and survival.
Hope this helps!