Taiga

Taiga is experiencing her first full winter of running with a team. She will be two in August. She is one of Blitzi's puppies, along with Jinx, Dora and Chili. Taiga is very friendly and has a lot of energy which makes spending time with her hard because that energy gets translated into squirmy-ness much of the time. I may be wrong, but I don't think that Taiga will be a leader anytime soon. She can be easily distracted and she still needs to learn about pacing herself, also, because she will work extra hard at the beginning of a run but will slack off towards the end because she is getting tired.

Taiga is a good dog most of the time. She has escaped from the drop lines twice this winter but has always come back when called. Taiga's biggest fault right now is that she is a terrible harness chewer. She can shred a harness in the time it takes to get dog, hook it to the gangline and turn around. She is the one responsible for this:

Although she can be free walked, last winter Jenn and I had her, her sister Dora and two other dogs out on a walk in early spring. Before either of us could react, Taiga had run down our river-access trail and was out on the river ice which was none too safe; she had to jump open water to get to where she was. Taiga was running full tilt towards town, down the river, with open water on both sides of her. I thought for sure she was going to either fall through the ice or run loose in town. As it happend, she did neither and she managed to come back the way she had gone when we called her (or, rather, when she decided to hear us).