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How To Host A Paint A Dog House Day For A Sled Dog Kennel

Sarah · July 29, 2015 ·

We are writing this article for our fellow dog mushing friends who are looking for ways to incorporate more local outreach into their kennel. After the Sockeye Wildfire devastated the mushing community of Willow, many mushers and non-mushers alike banded together to help the displaced sled dogs get new homes. Operation Doghouse became a community-wide effort dedicated to rebuilding houses for sled dogs that were lost in the Sockeye fire. Working together with #Operation DogHouse we thought it would be great if we could write about our own success as a kennel in hosting Paint-a-Pooloza and give advice on how to host a similar event.

It’s important as mushers and mushing fans that we work together to increase accessibility to our sport.

Paint-A-Pooloza was an event hosted at Turning Heads Kennel in May of 2015 as a way to involve the local community of Seward, its artists, and its children in our kennel. Running the event was a blast and we hope by publishing how we did this event that more kennels will be able to follow suit.

We added our event to our local community event page, for Seward we have two local online places to submit events: www.SewardEvents.com and www.SewardCityNews.com. Seward City News is an online publication and we used this platform to promote our event in the three weeks leading up to it.

In addition, we created simple eye-catching flyers for our event and posted them throughout town with permission from the owners or managers of the property. Some high visibility places that we posted in our town included our local grocery stores, gas stations, and our public library. We also connected with key community leaders who were involved in boy scouts or girl scouts to help us promote our event and would ensure that families would know we were doing something. We advertised sled dog rides, because we are a tour kennel, but most children would be happy simply to meet sled dogs or learn about mushing. Children also love puppies so If you (or a neighboring kennel that wouldn’t mind sharing) have puppies, consider advertising that. We advertised hot dogs and root beer as well.

Preparing for our event, we choose several bright colors. We have always been a fan of bold “loud” colors because we feel like they make our dog yard a very happy place. In general we have found that a gallon of paint covers about 4 or 5 houses. We bought paint but also put out advertisements saying we were looking for old paint on local websites and our local Seward community Facebook groups. People are more than happy to get rid of their unused paint!

We then purchased the supplies we needed for our event. We estimated an attendance of anywhere between 50-100 people and realized unused supplies could be used later in the summer or for other events, as we frequently do staff barbecues throughout the summer. This may not be the case for every kennel however. We purchased 96 hot dogs and buns from costco, ketchup, mustard, relish, paper plates, plastic silver, and plastic cups. We also bought otter pops and ice cream as we were going to serve root beer. We also bought napkins, baby wipes, and purell.

For painting, we purchased 6 gallons of paint. We also picked up several different sized foam brushes as well as 4 brush sets (containing 11 brushes each) from Home Depot.

To prepare for the event we scrubbed our houses with a wire brush. Then we power-washed our dog houses to remove any old paint and dirt. We washed some houses the day of and during the event as we ran out of time. This didn’t prove to be a problem because they dried quickly.

We poured paint into plastic cups for painters to use. Each cup of paint came with its own brush. People were encouraged to share, swap, and be creative as possible. We provided painters tape to those who wanted more geometrical designs.

The day of the event we closed our dog yard off but took turns taking small groups of people into the yard. Our dog yard is fenced. If you don’t have a fence around your dog lot consider getting plastic fencing or roping it off. Put up signs as well. We have a sign outside our dog yard that says “Not all dogs have good manners. Please do not enter without a guide.” Our dogs are used to guests and small children. If your dogs aren’t good with strangers, explain that. Every musher’s kennel is different and our dogs have lots of exposure to people they don’t know.

Another thing that you could do would be to set up a display of your winter gear to let kids try on or to see. It’s always nice to have an interactive element of some kind — just make sure everyone has clean paint-free hands before letting them touch your $800 parka!

To make sure your event goes smoothly, make sure you have plenty of volunteers on hand able to help. We had two people dedicated to grilling during lunchtime hours and other volunteers who helped refill paint cups. Additionally, make sure you have two or three trash cans available. Hot dogs and baked beans were easy and were a big hit. The root beer and ice cream proved to be a nice, easy treat for a sunny day that the kids loved too.

We set a time limit for our event and advertised it lasting from 11-4pm. The last visitors left around 5pm because they wanted to finish their design; we knew that it would probably last longer than advertised and didn’t have a problem with that.

Don’t forget that some people are willing to help clean up. You can set up stations for washing brushes and disposing of leftover paint. We let our houses dry for 24 hours before moving them back into our yard and in with the dogs.

Here is a wonderful video of our event:

[su_youtube url=”https://youtu.be/JnOvGRAKW84″]

If you have any more questions, please feel free to email me at: Sarah@SewardHelicopters.com

Volunteering with The Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association

Sarah · October 11, 2011 ·

One of our sponsors is the Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association. Every year they kindly donate us fish after they have taken eggs from them and in exchange we try to help them out when they need it. They use the eggs they collect to stock the hatcheries. They also monitor how many fish they get as it is critical to fish and game for determining when they can open up to commercial fisherman in the beginning of the season. They have to let so many fish return to their spawning grounds so that the salmon population will stay stable before they can allow fisherman to start catching them. Good idea, because they sure are tasty!

The Bear Creek Weir, which is where we get our fish from here in town, has two big salmon runs. In the spring, they have the Sockeye Salmon, also known as the reds (for salmon illiterate folk like me) and here in the fall they have the Silvers.

Not really knowing a whole lot about salmon, I found coming down to volunteer some of my time pretty interesting. The whole idea is that we are helping the hatcheries and keeping the salmon stock healthy. To that extent, we’ve collected about 140 silver salmon eggs and fertilized them so far. It’s a pretty interesting process. First, the salmon swim up to the weir. It’s approximately a 7-mile swim from the ocean to the weir and takes the fish about 5 days. Then, the fish are forced to swim up into the fish trap.

Salmon Fish Trap: This is the only opening in Bear Creek so the fish are forced to swim up into the holding pens.

Once in the fish trap they are sorted male/female. For every 3 females the weir takes 1 male. I’m still not exactly sure why they don’t do a 1:1 ratio, but I guess they have their reasons!

Salmon in holding tank. They are separated male/female.

When enough fish have been captured, the weir performs an egg take. That’s when we go in and help them. Although no one part of the egg take is particularly difficult, when you add it all together if you don’t have enough people it can be a lot of work.

The first thing we do is kill the fish. We only kill a few at a time so that everything stays fresh. I ended up helping bleed fish on one of the days I helped for the first part of the morning. Essentially, I cut near the tail so that the fish would bleed out. It makes it easier to take the eggs and, more importantly, to get a kidney sample later on.

They put the eggs of three females in one bucket. Then, they take a male salmon and (this is kind of gross) they essentially squeeze the sperm out of him to fertilize the eggs. Once this is done, the eggs are put in a salt water rinse.

These salmon eggs have been fertilized and are now being rinsed with salt water so that they will “harden”

Another shot of the fertilized salmon eggs. The salt water also helps the sperm live longer so that more eggs will get fertilized.

The fish, both male and female, are then taken and kidney samples are taken to ensure that they don’t have kidney disease. I guess it is a pretty prevalent disease among salmon and they are trying to ensure a healthy stock. From what I could tell (I mostly bagged kidneys) it seemed like the fish were healthy. If the findings show any of the fish have the disease, however, the eggs will be tossed out.

Opening up a salmon. We took kidney samples from every fish to check for kidney disease.

Kidney sample from the 80th female. This will be tested for kidney disease. If it’s positive, the eggs from this fish will be thrown out.

After all that has been done, Travis and I get to take some of the fish and the rest goes to other local mushers. It’s really a great set up and we’re really happy we have such a cool way to spend our time and to help out. We are extremely grateful that the Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association helps us feed our dogs tasty salmon all winter long and that they provide us with such an interesting volunteer opportunity!