A minimum of five hundred dogs of the same breed is a sufficient gene pool to support their own population. I ran fifteen purebred Canadian Eskimo Dogs before an accident in March 2006. At the time only three hundred existed. They’d been struggling on the endangered list for thirty years.

Greenland is different. Here there are over 20,000 working dogs. Unlike Arctic Canada, by law Greenlandic hunters use their dog teams not snowmobiles, trucks or planes. In Arctic Canada working dog-teams were prolific. The memory is now relegated to dead cultural history and rightly or wrongly that’s due to the fact that during the 1960s and 1970s the Canadian police (RCMP) were accused of slaughtering 21,000 dogs to immobilise the Canadian Inuit. Even now the controversy continues to the reason why.

For years I’d been told I should have moved to Greenland from Canada. I was still hospitalised when research findings were publicised clarifying that the Greenland Dog and Canadian Eskimo Dog populations are of exactly the same dog breed. From hospital I began my move to Greenland. Oh, by the way, if you don’t like the word ‘Eskimo’ and consider it a derogatory slur on the Canadian Inuit take it out on the Canadian Kennel Club. It’s their choice of breed title, not mine.

The Greenland Dog was brought into the country with the last major migration from Canada, the Thule Culture, around 1100 AD. In all that time Greenland’s dog population is believed to have been totally isolated from the rest of the world.

It’s illegal to import dogs above the Arctic Circle in Greenland. If a dog is flown below Greenland’s Arctic Circle it will never ever be allowed back. Why? To keep the Greenland Dog breed pure.

I own eighteen Greenland Dogs and run twelve to fourteen in a team. They despise physical and mental cowardice. Everything about them is vast and strong. They have boundless positive confidence in themselves and everything they do. They are aggressive in their appetite to do what they've been bred to do and that's pull massive payloads in brutal cold. For over two thousand years the selection process was, if you pulled hard, you lived. What remains are incredible canine athletes with unique traits; powerful dominant dogs that are incredibly strong-willed. With huge chests and fur over twenty centimetres thick they are the Panzer tanks of the dog world, stop at nothing and I love them dearly.

Treatment

Shocker

Stunner

Max

Blimey

Proper

Loads

Girly

Spitz

Yogi

Bigness

Mikkey Dee

Plet
 

Cracker

Gibson

King

Spud