Dr. Arleigh Reynolds graduated from Cornell University and was on the faculty at Cornell University. He worked for Nestlé Purina Pro Plan as a senior nutritional scientist from 1998 through 2023. Arleigh is now on the faculty at University of Alaska, Fairbanks since 2014.
In his world of sled dogs, Arleigh went on to be a three time world champion in sprint mushing. He’s one of six mushers in the history to win a Triple Crown, winning the open North American, the Fur Rendezvous, and the Tok Race of Champions.
Arleigh is a professor of clinical nutrition. He’s a diplomat to the American College of Veterinary internal medicine. He’s a director of the center of One Health Research at University of Alaska, Fairbanks.”There’s one simple answer to that… take the dog’s temperature. One of the things I’ve always tried to do with my guys ’cause dogs are individuals and we were running teams of 16/18 dogs at a time so you gotta be able to read each one of those dogs and what they’re telling you, one of the things I would always do in the summer time when we were exercising is take the dog’s temperature so I could get an idea of what temperature correlated with what behaviour for individual dogs, and that was really helpful and that’s something somebody can do and get an idea of how hot, you’d be surprised I think when you take those dog’s temperatures how hot some of those dogs are getting, we had dogs that would sometimes come back from a summer workout with temperatures of 108/109 Fahrenheit, the key was that they would drop down below 104 in less than a minute, if they’re staying above 104/105 for any period of time that’s when you really gotta be careful. One of the things I learn’t that really helped me a lot in terms of heat tolerance for helping the dogs you wanna acclimate them to warm weather but you don’t wanna get them so hot that they get hurt, certainly exercising in warm weather helps, having access to allow them to cool off like swimming and stuff like that helps.
One of the things we found with our dogs is when they get really warm they pant really hard and they get this white foamy saliva that kinda coats their mouth and back of their throat, that’s a real problem because dogs as predators they don’t sweat like we do, the way that their cooling mechanism is designed is they pant so that they can keep their brain cool, there’s a blood vessel plexus in the back of their throat that acts like a radiator in a car and when they pant they’re moving air over that thing and the evaporation of the moisture cools the blood that’s going to their brain and keeps their brain from overheating even though their body’s getting pretty warm so that they can continue to chase prey, it’s just an adaptation, but here’s the problem… when they get all that white foam there it insulates that radiator and it doesn’t work very well, so one of the things we taught our dogs to do was to drink out of a squirt bottle, not so much ’cause we were trying to give them so much water but we were trying to rinse that stuff off the back of their throat so their cooling mechanism would be more efficient and they wouldn’t have to pant as hard to stay cool, it really made a big difference.
– Houndsman XP Podcast: Feeding Hounds for Nutrition and Performance. Nov 2019
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6DuHXxXHqix7YmLcd8I4Yv
