Anna Peekstok Communications
Seattle, WA 206-524-5050 ap@annapeekstok.com
Scootering: harnessing the energy of dogs who love to run.
Bark, Spring 2003
What dog person hasn’t thought, while being tugged down a city street on what was supposed to be the take-charge end of a leash, “How can I harness this vast untapped energy?”
Maybe your pooch was on a sled team in his last life and wants to revel in that ancestral memory, but you’re stuck with city sidewalks instead of unspoiled tundra. Don’t despair; there’s a new sport that brings the joys of dog-powered locomotion to pet owners in the “lower 48”. All it takes is a harness, a dog who loves to run, and a scooter.
Daphne Lewis of Seattle dreamed up dog scootering while exercising with her Rottweiler, Rubromarginata—“Ruby” for short. At the time, she didn’t know anyone else in the world was hitching dogs to scooters, but “when I got a bigger computer and could get on the Internet, I found out it was a big deal in Europe,” she says. Australians were also using scooters, having discovered that utilizing dogs to pull mountain bikes can result in damaged ankles from the flailing pedals.
Still, no one was marketing a scooter specifically fr use with dogs. Overseas enthusiasts typically built their own, or modified mountain bikes. Lewis started working with an Australian company, Jones Leisure Tech, to develop a scooter with the features she wanted: large wheels for speed and a smooth ride, a platform wide enough to stand on with both feet, and brakes that can hold up to serious downhill coasting (required to keep the scooter from running into the dog on the downslopes). “It took two or three years of trial and error before we got to the scooter we have now,” she says.
In the meantime, she self-published a book on dog scootering, built a website (www.dogscooter.com) that is still the world’s primary resource on the sport, and became the U.S. distributor for the scooters she was helping to design. She sailed through city parks on her bright red scooter at Ruby’s stately pace, and let people try it out when they expressed interest. Soon there were enough local enthusiasts with their own equipment to organize monthly “Fun Runs” at nearby trails.
One such event last spring drew a mixed crowd of participants, from alpine mushers with experienced team dogs to first-timers trying out borrowed or brand-new scooters with their confused but excited pets. Occasionally Lewis hitched an inexperienced dog in tandem with Ruby, who cheerfully pulled all comers and showed the “newbie” dogs how it’s done.
It does take some skill, on the part of both human and dog, to scooter smoothly. The dog needs to be comfortable running in front, instead of beside, his person, and should learn some commands to cover a basic set of situations: “hike” for “go,” “gee” for “turn right,” “haw” for “turn left,” “whoa”, and “on by” for “leave it alone and keep going.” The human part of the team needs to stay aware of how the dog is doing and keep an eye on the terrain. On hills the rider can assist by pushing the scooter, or even getting off and running alongside it until the ground levels out. That way both members of the team get the benefit of outdoor exercise as well as the fun of doing something together.
Joe Brown, a Seattle database developer who came to the March Fun Run with Bessie, his year-old Presa Canario, says it took a couple of weeks for Bessie to get the hang of pulling him on his scooter. “It was like 15 minutes a day for about the first two weeks, and then it just clicked,” he says. They made the 2.8-mile circuit around Seattle’s Green Lake in about 20 minutes, then started doing weekly jaunts of up to 20 miles on city trails. “Now all I have to say to her is, ‘Hey, Bessie, you want to scooter?’” he says. “This morning she got very excited.”
Brown praises scootering as “the one thing you can do with your dog where they can go like 15 miles in a straight line, and the faster they go, the happier you are.” Strangers sometimes chide him for making Bessie do all the work, but both he and Lewis say pulling an adult on a scooter on level ground isn’t as hard on the dog as it looks. “Once you get rolling, the dog really only has to put in about five, maybe 10 pounds of extra force into it,” Brown says. “It’s sort of like running with weights—it’s really good for them.”.
In fact, Lewis says, pulling a scooter is great for dogs with joint problems, like Ruby, who at age nine has had four operations on three legs due to a couple of car-related accidents. “Scootering builds up the muscle around the joints and protects them,” she says. “[Playing with] a tennis ball is twisting and turning; scootering is straight ahead. It’s much safer.”
Perhaps even more important, she says, it gives the dog a job. “Dogs are treated like children—you know, ‘go eat,’ ‘go sit,’ ‘go play.’ Giving them a job allows them to be a bit more of an adult in relation to you.”
“Scootering is a way to learn respect for the dog,” she adds, “because you can see them choosing the way to go. There’s something about watching them think about the problems in front of them as they go that’s just wonderful.”