You haven’t lived, not really, until you’ve experienced the thrill of tandem dog-carting.
Photography by Adam Thornton
We are owned by three Greater Swiss Mountain You’ll need a strong, reasonably large dog
Dogs. The Greater Swiss Mountain Dog was bred that likes to work. If you want to build a cart like
as a general-purpose farm dog, but one of their the one in this article, you’ll need a pair of them,
traditional tasks has been hauling carts full of although you could, if you really wanted to, build
milk jugs. They’re relatives of the St. Bernard, a scaled-down tandem cart for your Chinese
the Rottweiler, and particularly the Bernese Cresteds. If you live in a colder climate, you
Mountain Dog. They can be thought of as “the might want to investigate sledding. Conversely,
poor man’s horse,” although they make for pecu- your local sled dog club may also put on carting
liarly snuggly horses. events when the weather is warmer, and it’s quite
likely to have members who know about drafting.
Drafting with Dogs Two of our Swissies — Golem and Ursa —
Canine drafting has a fairly large following in already know how to draft, and, although we have the Newfoundland, Rottweiler, Swissy, and Ber- two carts (technically, a cart and a wagon; wagons nese Mountain Dog worlds. If you are interested, have four wheels, while carts have two), both of canadasguidetodogs.com/clubs/draftdog.htm them are designed to be pulled by a single dog. is a pretty good place to start looking. There’s Since we’ve got two carting dogs, we wanted to also a Yahoo Groups list: CARTING-L. build a cart that both of them could pull at once.
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