SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
For a high-energy dog, many of the city's pet owners agree, there's no track like the Dettah ice road.
Brandon Lebrun takes his Labrador retriever and Akita shepherd on the Dettah ice road for some high energy exercise, Saturday. He said the wide ice road is much safer for dog running than the winding Vee Lake Road at Giant Mine. - Thandiwe Vela/NNSL photo
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For Brandon Lebrun, taking his Labrador retriever and Akita shepherd onto the ice road for a game of catch and a run beside his truck has been a regular activity for years.
"It's a good place to just let them run," he said. "It's not too busy."
The vast width of the ice road makes it a safer alternative to the Vee Lake Road near Giant Mine, he said, which is another popular destination for dog running.
"I've heard of a lot of close calls out there," he said of the winding road heading north off the Ingraham Trail. "Vee Lake, with the turns, you can't see oncoming traffic."
While some Yellowknifers cringe at the sight of dog running, Lebrun said he keeps his dogs behind him, and takes enough safety precautions to mitigate the risk of injuring his dogs.
"For me, it seems you have to try to run them over," he said frankly.
While Robert Doak, 17, keeps his Chevy Cavalier parked when he takes his two miniature schnauzers for a run on the Dettah ice road, he has no problem with other people running their dogs with their vehicles.
"I think, for the dogs, it could be a really good source of exercise," he said. "I think it might be fun."
How safe the run is depends on the type of dog, Doak said, explaining why he runs along with his dogs, instead of running them with his vehicle.
"I'm afraid of oncoming traffic and I don't know how my dogs will deal with it," he said.
Despite the popularity of dog running, some organizations, including the Great Slave Animal Hospital and the NWT SPCA, have cited the activity as a huge safety issue.
"We're against it, let's put it that way," said Nicole Spencer, president of the NWT SPCA, who said the practice is not limited to the ice road and Vee Lake Road.
"It is pretty common, unfortunately. Almost every time I drive past the Sand Pits to go to the shelter I'll see somebody running their dogs that way. I even saw somebody in town running their dog. It was crazy, I couldn't believe it. It was a van and their dog was running behind their van down 52 Street. It was crazy. What are you doing?"
Many dogs have been injured or even killed by their owners while dog running, according to Kim Elkin, who was a veterinarian with the Great Slave Animal Hospital when she wrote a letter to the editor to Yellowknifer in 2005 advising against the running of dogs with vehicles.
"But I wasn't going that fast when I hit him," Elkin recalled hearing an enumerable number of times from clients carrying their run over dog through the front door of the vet clinic.
"It's the same old story," Elkin wrote. "Only the consequences vary ... bruised muscles, broken bones, a crushed pelvis, internal bleeding, dead on arrival. And the guilt on the owner's part remains the same, 'If only I'd known.'"
Spencer said the NWT SPCA is planning to roll out an anti-dog running campaign in the coming weeks to spread awareness about the risks involved.
"Because you can't really control your dog, you don't know what your dog is going to do,” said Spence. “It could run past your car, it could get in between the wheels, the vehicle could slide, anything could happen. I think that if we could stop a few people, if a few people stop, that's potentially saving a couple dogs' lives."
