Dog Sled!

So immediately when you think of dog sledding, your mind goes to the picture above. I'm sure that's fun and exciting in itself, but I have yet to experience it. No, what I'm talking about is here in the United States, just taking your regular house dog and in the winter time, having them pull you down a good sledding hill.

Last winter my friends and I gave this a try with their pit bull, Nela. We sat at the top of a huge hill, holding on to Nela's leash with both hands. We shoved off and the momentum pulled us down. At first it worked as planned. The sled rushing down the hill scared her, and she ran forward pulling us behind, trying to escape it. Then she got smart and stepped to the side trying to get away. This pulled the sled sideways, almost tipping us. Towards the end, Nela began to get angry and started to try and attack the sled, which only caused to jerk us around in small circles. Needless to say, our idea did not work very well.


Our next idea was to just hold her on the sled with us, so she could come along for the ride. While it did work, we received many scratches and cuts from our efforts and I don't believe that she enjoyed it very much. The one good thing we discovered though was that she loved running up the snow-covered hill. Because of this, she came in handy pulling us back up and helping us to save some of our energy. So our experiments weren't a total waste of time.

I would give our experience of dog sledding a 4.