Reading today's Saturday Telegraph, an article about sledding "Alaskan Huskies" in Aviemore. Described as "mongrel mutts". What are these? - Siberian X Malamutes or what?

Also Pointers are added in Scandinavian countries. Thes are a purpose bred cross for sledracing. Something on similar principles to Lurchers.

I saw the article too ..very good it was too. Alaskan Huskies , apparantly , give the Mushers the speed of the Siberian Husky PLUS the strength of the Alaskan Malamute



Melody

I saw a programme a few months ago about huskies and they had some Alaskan huskies on it.They were bred with various other breeds to improve speed .A couple were racing their huskies-the woman had a team of pure bred huskies that raced over longer distances and the husband had some alaskans (looked x-greyhound!!)that were racing over short fast tracks.
Suppose they must be bred like lurchers-depending on what their wanted for.
Archer

I was surprised at the range of sizes mentioned in the article - some the size of a cocker spaniel, others as big as an 'Alsatian'. I'm not sure what use a cocker spaniel-sized husky would be?!

I went dogsledding in canada a few years ago and they were cross malamute/huskie/labrador/greyhound and they did look like mongrels and i went to see a dogsledding place in scotland and his dogs are cross huskie/pointer and they look like pointers with blue eyes, he did also have huskies but the pointer crosses were going to be his new racing team, did you know they are trying to get dogsledding into the winter olympics it would be great if they could do that.

Can I just say that we are all working hard to get the sport into the Olympics for 2006. There are now quite a few teams in the Uk who have 'hound' (varying breed/lines) teams and are training hard ready to jump at the chance to go out to the olympics.

As for the Alaskans there probably only a handful in the UK (we are lucky to have a couple). Alaskans do not have any Malamute in their lines, this would totally defeat the idea behind the breeding. As already discussed, they are bred for speed, the speed comes from various different dogs such as pointers, salukis, greyhounds........ the endurance and good feet come form the Siberian lines.

These dogs can be used for sprint, middle and long distance races. Nowadays though sprint racing has moved up a notch and we are now seeing ultra fast dogs, that have virtually no Siberian left in the lines. These tend to originate from lines in Europe - the Eurohounds, but there are other kennels in Europe, Alaska, Canada and the USA as a whole, that have their own breedings of dogs along similar lines.

Hope this explains it a bit better.

Just a thought, World Agility Championships only allows pedigree dogs so be careful you aren't caught in the same trap. Many of UK's top agility dogs are WSD so are not able to be considered for team.
Anne

Thanks for the advice Anne, although this is not a problem in sleddog sport. We are catered for by having both registered classes (where only pure bred sleddogs ie. Sibes, Alaskan Mals, Greenland/ Eskimo, Samoyeds run) and we have OPEN classes where we can run any form of dog that has been trained correctly and is suitable to work in harness (in other words no papillons, yorkies or unsuitable breeds that would be put at risk if used in the sport). These dogs need no registration papers, although many countries have a register for non pure bred sleddogs.

There are purebred world championships (where the true Siberian etc. enthuisasts can compete against dogs of the same level) and also the world championships (where unfortunately the pure bred teams do not get a look in!). The latter being won for many years by teams of Alaskan huskies and more recently Eurohounds.

We have been slower than most countries on the uptake of open dogs and there are still many opposed to the idea (I am not going into the politics!). We like to think that it is a free country and we can choose to run whatever breed we like, we still have 2 actively competing pure bred Siberian teams as well as our open teams.

As I say thanks for the advice but hopefully it should not cause a problem in our sport/pastime.