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A slower look at our sled dogs


BlueWolf

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This is a video I shot a few weeks ago. We are in the middle of the training season with our dogs. We've had some snow but it has melted again. So until we have proper snow we use a quad bike to train our dogs. With up to 12 dogs in front of it (sometimes even 14) they to absolutely crazy just before we start. This time I wanted a different perspective on it, a little bit calmer...

I don't know why but I love looking at this. Every dog is doing something different, so much to see.

 

And to add to that, this was Bee yesterday before launch, lol.

 

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1 hour ago, Luna the husky said:

That video is brilliant!! It’s almost like watching worlds strongest man pulling a lorry lol


Sent from my iPhone using Husky Owners

Oh and they are strong. A while ago I jumped into the rabbit hole to answer the random question that had popped into my head one day: "How much horse power can a dog pull?"

 

I found this interesting paper from 1957 where they did exactly that, to measure how much a sled dog can pull. For sustainable long distances a single trained sled dog can pull about 0.19 hp on average. But there are jolts, especially at the start to get the sled moving (like in this video for the quadbike). In the paper the maximum jolt was recorded at 0.235 hp. So for 12 dogs that means they could probably be pulling up to about 2.82 horse-power right in that video.

Now short term we humans can output a lot of horse-power (think weight lifting). But if we're talking about sustainable long term, an untrained average adult can output about 0.27hp. A properly trained athlete could output as high as 0.54hp that that is probably really the absolute maximum we can reach.

But.. we and dogs have a different power to weight ratio. We are heavier than dogs. So if you take the 0.19hp from the dog, divide it to their reported average dog weight (39kg), and multiple it by the average adult weight (62kg), a dog our size would output about 0.30hp. Which is in stronger than the average person!

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