Around The Globe Floods Bring Out The Best In Many

When I scroll through my FB news feed and other news channels I use these last weeks, they are full of tragedy, hardships and action around the huge floods that occur worldwide.

From little Alaskan town of Galena on the banks of the mighty Yukon river, that got nearly swept off the surface, to Czech Republic´s capital city of Prague.

The scenes, photographs and videos, but also heartbreaking articles of families losing everything, farm animals escaping from their pastures as rushing water sneaks in at night, to cats in flooded cabins, ZOO animals being evacuated, horses needed to be rescued by firemen from flooded stables, all this makes is hard to bare, hard to keep your mind away from it all, even when you sit thousands of miles away, in a dry place, with all your possessions intact, like me and my dogs.

But tragedy is not what I want to write about and I decided to write this post in honor of all those who help out during these hard times.

Read more »

DIY Dog Quilt From Re-Purposed T-Shirts

Photo courtesy of ohmydogblog.com

I love ideas that serve more purposes at once. 

I support fully Do It Yourself projects, handmade stuff and home cooked meals. Call me old fashioned if you will, but I´ve turned the direction of re-purposing, re-cycling and making what I can by myself, a long time ago :)

Read more »

Mud and Ice Everywhere...

Unless you´re a musher from Alaska or basically anywhere in the USA or Canada (those guys just stole our cold weather! :)), you know painfully well what this post title means.

But I am not going to complain here about not enough mileage on the dogs, warm and very humid weather, muddy training runs or the cursed recent ice that forced us to retreat by the fireplace.

Ok, I will complain a little, but it will not bring us snow nor below zero temps, and most certainly will not put a smile on my face. I know that fellow mushers throughout Scandinavia suffer the same. 

Anyway, I thought to keep you all up to date on the latest happenings here at Kipp d´Amundsen Kennels.

Sandra as a happy camper with the puppy team

The major downer is the leaving of Sandra, our very reliable and overall great handler. Sandra´s mom underwent an extremely complicated and painful surgery and Sandra is back home, helping take care of her. We all hope for her return whenever it´s possible and wish her mom a speedy recovery!

On the positive note we were fortunate enough to find temporary help rather quickly. Martyna Szczykutowicz is an experienced dog handler, husky lover and a passionate rescue and re-homing volunteer from Poland. And thank to that, all the special needs dogs at the kennel are being exercised on a daily basis and chores are done much quicker.

While the weather is testing us like this the past few days, we have decided it was a perfect opportunity to work in detail on plans for this year´s racing season, the 2012 sponsoring program and -- our new website.

First of all, let me introduce new sponsor and partner of Kipp d´Amundsen Team - Blomyard.Se Kreativ Reklam. 

This Strömsund based small business has a huge and flexible offer of advertising services, they print posters, prints, cards, stickers, business cards, brochures, design websites, etc. They will be giving a "face" to our dog truck and a proper presentation of our main sponsors on it :) Thank you so much Ylwa and team!

While we have updated the SPONSOR A DOG program, made actualization of the popular ADVERTISING and other sponsoring and support possibilities, we would also like to proudly announce, that we have teamed up with THE ANIMAL RESCUE SITE (partners of The Petfinder.Com) and HUSKY ADOPCJE (read this blog post) and while fundraising for our upcoming season, we´ll be as well fundraising and donating to these two great organisations to help animals in need.

We are very excited about these partnerships.

If you would like to see how you can help both - The Kipp d´Amundsen Team and dogs and cats in shelters, needing surgeries and medical treatments, while forever homes for them are being sought, please take a look here.

All this brings me to the final and one of the most exciting news - our new official website has been finally launched! A project we´ve been working on for the past year and never seemed to be able to finish it. A huge and grateful thank you to Martyna for the great and patient help (not only making great banners and other graphic work, but also for the care taking of the dogs while we slept after our 4:00 bed times the past three days)!!!

Jachym is still tweaking some details, but with no further due, here it is, the loved and hated final product, which I hope will serve you well in providing information about our dogs, kennel and happenings:

www.kippdamundsen.com

Please, also note not only the new website address, but also new email address, which you will find in the "contact" section. 

Please be patient with us as we still have to develop couple of pages and some of the dogs´s presentations, which is fairly difficult with the heavy training underway.

Hoping to go out for a few longer runs in the upcoming days (the weather forecast promises some rain showers - aaaah, so "motivating"!) 

Anyway, hope everyone´s safe and sound and here´s to all my fellow co-sufferers - Let´s all think SNOW!

Happy Trails!www.blomyard.se

Time to Give, Love and Share

With the time of Thanksgiving and Christmas approaching, it is naturally time to open hearts, to give and share and to think about the others.

As you may know from following us on Facebook, we happened to get into needing a temporary handler for several weeks. We were fortunate to get an experienced dog handler, dog person and a husky lover Martyna from Poland. And with her, we learned about the rescue and re-homing organisation for huskies, malamutes and other nordic breeds and their crosses, that she tirelessly and passionately devotes majority of her free time to.

In the modern world, there are more and more rescue and adoption organisations and it is great to see the efforts in many European countries getting more and more professional and successful in helping and re-homing siberian huskies and other sled dog breeds and their crosses. 

But I must say I am impressed about the work of HUSKY ADOPCJE, that Martyna have helped to develop over the past four years.

They have strict rules about adoption families, whom they also visit and check after adoptions have been made. They have a number of foster homes (Martyna being one of them) and if they can´t find a foster home for a dog in need, they put strong efforts into financing a dog-hotel for the given dog, rather than keeping him or her in an over crowded shelter or in a bad life situation. 

Besides rescue, fostering and adoption services, HUSKY ADOPCJE also works hard on educating the public about the specifics of nordic breeds and sled dogs. They have a public discussion forum and even their own team at sled dog races. One of the adoptive families just won several different classes at a local race with her rescued sibes this past weekend!

As any other rescue organisation, they of course do all kinds of fundraising projects and depend on virtual adoptions and sponsors.

I learned that in the past two yearsHUSKY ADOPCJE found forever homes to around 200 huskies and their crosses, some of which were besides Poland also in Germany, Italy or for example Norway.

In my family, we were brought up to help animals in need and always supported honest rescue efforts in one or other way. 

Those who met  Jachym and me know, that we are not afraid to say out loud our opinion of poor animal care or disrespect. 

Jachym and I have personally started Siberian Husky Rescue in Czech Republic before we moved to Sweden. We have occasionally helped place siberians, malamutes and alaskans and our lives have been blessed by several great dogs from puppy mill breeders, abusive homes and even from the street, over the years. (in loving thoughts and memories to to Jerry, Danny, Adelaide and Holci). We know we all can always do more.

For us, this is a natural way of the heart and we can strongly recommend to everyone considering getting a perfect, loving, four-legged companion, to get a rescued/shelter or a stray dog!

I once came across a great quote, and I couldn´t agree with it more. It´s message is very clear:

If you breed - rescue. If you don´t breed - rescue anyway!

And if you can´t have a furry bundle of love at home for some reason, you can always help them by supporting a good, ethical and hard working rescue group! 

I am so glad we found one like that in HUSKY ADOPCJE, and we look forward to supporting their efforts.

While we are raising funds for our 2012 race season, we will donate 10:-Swedish crowns (1EUR or 1,5USD) from each sold item from my Kipp d´Amundsen Art & Design collection of original hand painted ceramics, porcelain and cards.

Please visit Husky Adopcje´s website and learn how you can help (you can get the website translated to English via Google Translate). You can do as little as placing their banner on your website, you can virtually adopt one of the huskies waiting for the right home or help raise funds for medical care for those in need. Or perhaps you would like to give a loving, forever home to a furry friend, who would sweep you off your feet with his or her unconditional love...

Happy Thanksgiving and stay safe!

All photos in this article courtesy of www.huskyadopcje.pl