People get upset about sled dogs being on tethers without understanding WHY they’re kept that way. Here are a few common sense solutions.

Benefits of a tether system:
– rarely escaping, preventing themselves from hurting themselves, ppl, other dogs, or breeding
– close monitoring of individual health needs
– controlled recovery from exercise
– no competition for resources
– no disturbance for rest
– choice of playmates
– can be left unsupervised without worry

Every dog in our kennel has a minimum of 3 playmates and a maximum of 6, they can just touch but not get tangled. They have plenty of room. Each dog has 254 sq ft of space which is bigger than a 12′ X 12′ kennel. If the chains were any longer they would risk injuring their neck or trachea. 6-8′ is ideal for elevated systems, you can go longer with chains attached at ground level. We use the lightest chains possible within reason, anything smaller than 3/8″ will break. We never use cable, it will bend, fray, and break easily and the dogs can chew through it in seconds.

We arrange the kennel by littermates for various reasons.

Here Metallica and Stout are playing with each other. They have the option of escaping if needed due to the tethers. If they were kept in a kennel together this could easily escalate into a dog fight.

“Why don’t you put them in a large fenced in open area?”

That’s a recipe for disaster. First and foremost they cannot be left unsupervised, you’ll have severely injured dogs and possibly dead ones. Racing sled dogs do everything all out, nothing half way.

– anyone who understands athletics knows you shouldn’t run 2 marathons before you race a marathon that same day. you’ll get last place even if you finish. you’ll never get any speed or high end performance out of your dogs if you run them every single day. sprint racing sled dogs run every other day
– no privacy or down time means no recovery from work. this is very important
– females in heat cannot participate they cause fighting between males and you cannot control the breedings
– the individual health of each dog cannot be monitored i.e. vomiting, parasites, and diarrhea
– sled dogs are escape artists. fences are games for them
– most of them will fight over food
– imagine the amount of snow you’d have to remove to maintain all the gates and the fence line on 40 acres
– they’d kill themselves chasing butterflies in the summer heat via heat exhaustion
– sled dogs are extremely fast, imagine a head on collision between two dogs at a combined speed of 70 mph. Turbo broke his scapula at 3 years old colliding with his brother in the front yard. it ended his racing career
– any and every farmer knows that maintaining a fence line is a lot of work. imagine the amount of time wasted. if one dog busts out they ALL get out, unlike a tether system

There’s no reward for fenced in dogs, but dozens of risks.