01x03: Tom Andres | No leash, no trouble

JEANETTE: Today’s guest is Tom Andres from Germany. He is doing sprint and middle distance. Can you tell us a bit about how everything started?

TOM: It started now 25 years ago with my first Siberian husky, which was a show dog. After school, I was of the opinion I needed to have a dog. I needed to have a friend beside myself, doing many sports. So I thought it was a good opportunity to have a dog. Of course, it had to be a Siberian husky. It was nice-looking, black and white, blue eyes. So I bought the first one. It was a kind of show dog, but with already a nice body for running.

Then I started to meet the first people out of the competition scene who compete in the sled dog sport. I was interested, and half a year later I had four dogs and bought the first running Siberian huskies and started to compete in the sport.

Two years later it was then 16 Siberian huskies, so I was the guy who was jumping up very fast with the amount of dogs – which brings also some problems, because you should grow inside. Especially a kind of dog like this, which has not always the best behavior and it’s hard to teach them because they have their own head, and it’s a strong head. But I managed it after a few mistakes and after a few years. From mistakes you can just learn.

JEANETTE: What kind of challenges did you face?

TOM: One of the big challenges perhaps was the collecting of good dogs out of different kennels. If you want to have a good start, you need to go to the best kennels. But every kennel wants to reduce the problem dogs, so I was the one who got the best fighters. This was a problem, but I think it was very good for the purse of the veterinarians because I was there many times in the first years.

But we managed to do it on the other side. These dogs’ heads, really strong heads, which the people who sold me the dogs can feel after the first two years, when I started winning the races against them with the dogs they sold because they had a problem with this dog. I managed to get this in a lane that it’s still working. The secret always was to have a small kennel and less dogs. Then you can manage it.

You have the chance to pick out of a big kennel with perhaps 40 race dogs, you can pick out the problem dog because you have only 10, not 12 dogs, and you have more time for each individual. It was possible to bring them in a way where there was a handlebar. This was the start.

I was into the Siberian husky scene 7 years, and then looked over the border to the people on the other side, which was much faster than we, and fell in love with the Alaskans and with the Hounds. To this time, I was one of the best Siberian husky drivers, so it was easy for me to find a good kennel who would take nearly all the time. We are still friends, so after more than 20 years now, we are still friends. He’s not competing anymore, but he bought my whole race team, so I know all the team stayed together. He had quite good success a few years later. It was easy for me to step from the Siberian huskies to the hounds because the kennel was empty after a few days.

To the time I was racing the Siberian huskies, I was also going to the championships, like the German championship, European championship, world championships. You are always proud of yourself when you win something like this. It was the chasing after medals, let’s say. When I changed to the European hounds, my opinion also changed a little bit. I started to know people who had a completely different opinion to this and a completely different way of leading their dogs.

JEANETTE: Can you specify that?

TOM: Especially let’s say one name. It’s Heini Winter who is still a hero for me and is still I think one of the best dog guys in the world. How to lead dogs and how to think about all the race. He says winning is always super fantastic, everybody wants to win, but there’s only one guy who can win, and there are many guys behind. But if these guys behind do not exist, then also the winner is not there. He said always he loves to win, but also second place or perhaps tenth place – or if you have to give up a race, it’s not neck breaking. It’s still something we can live with.

In the end, we cannot win anything. On one hand, perhaps a sponsor or something like this, but this is not important in life. Important in life is to have fun with the things we do. I always have a talk with him about this because I’m very – I still like to win, to be honest. I give a lot to still be in front of the races or win the races. But when I talked to him, he said, “Okay, this time you don’t win, but it was fun. It was the same fun we had in first place like we have now in fifth place.” And he’s right.

JEANETTE: Yeah, many people tend to forget this, even if they do any kind of dog sport. It’s easy to forget, why are you doing this?

TOM: Yeah. Always keep in mind that if you have 100 competitors, there is only one on the top. Mostly it’s the three same guys for many years. As long as they have a superstar dog because they had the luck to get one of these real superstars, perhaps 1 of 1,000 dogs, as long as they have this dog, in this small part of his age where he can bring 100% or 110% – this is perhaps from 1.5 years or 5 or 6 years, depending on his weight and his desire to go – as long as this is like this, it will be always the same people who are in front if they work on themselves also.

People should not forget that nobody starts as a champion. everybody starts because he finds a solution or he finds a sport to come out of his normal business, day life, to come home from work, and then I take my friend – in this case it’s my dog – and go for a run in the forest, or go just for a walk, or play with him. It’s always important to think about this, why we start with this, and that we do it not for us and have a machine in front.

Always be careful of this machine, because we are the guys who are responsible for them. They always want to give 100%. If we overdo it and we do not keep him back, it’s easy to destroy our partner.

JEANETTE: Do you see this often, that dogs might be pushed a bit too hard?

TOM: Pushing is one side. The other side is perhaps also the organization responsible for a race or for a competition. They should also be on this side and say, “okay, the athletes, everybody wants to win and we have a big competition, but we are responsible that we look for them,” like a teacher is looking for children.

I think this is missed many times. If you go to some competitions and you see the dogs coming in shaking because the weather was much too extreme for let’s say a 5k run, and instead of shortening the distance, they say “no, we don’t shorten it because this is a competition and the dogs need to do 5k” – but if you run as a human in 20 degrees and have to do the same distance in 35 degrees, it is a big, big difference.

Like I always say, if the electricity circuit, if a fuse burns, I can take it out and put in a new one. But if the fuse of a dog burns, you never have the chance to reduce this and to make a new fuse inside. This dog will never give 100% because out of collapse, the organism of dogs always learn to stop earlier, to not reach this point anymore. We are responsible for this. We say this is too much or not, and it’s not something to be ashamed of to stop the race.

When you are in a race – and I also did it on myself one time – I was in a race, and in the middle of the race the dog was not healthy, but I was thinking “perhaps they can do it and then we have a one day break.” It could be. After 20 kilometers I stopped the race and went on the side. All the teams passed, and I walked back with the dogs to the finish line, because I said “for me, it’s done, because the dogs are not in the best health.” This you always have to remember.

JEANETTE: How do you see that now it’s enough for the dog? This could be a bit difficult for people, maybe, to know when to stop.

TOM: If you have one dog, like the canicross scene now, or two dogs, I think it’s not very difficult to see it. If you have a team of four, six, eight, or twelve dogs, the important thing is this team can only be as good as…

JEANETTE: As the weakest one on the team.

TOM: Yeah, as the weakest dog of the team. This dog you have to keep in your eyes. If this dog comes to the border, then you know we have to be careful. If perhaps one of your best dogs starts shaking or gets a problem or falling or was not drinking enough before the run, so they get a problem with water in the body, then you really have to think about what to do. It’s always easy to take out speed or to give them a break.

Even in a long race, if you go like me in a middle distance race for 45 kilometers, it’s not a problem to stop for 30 seconds or 1 minute. Give the dogs a snack. Let them perhaps go into the snow and eat some snow to get water back. Because if you lose the race in this 30 seconds, then from the beginning there was no possibility to win it.

Always be smart with this, because the dog you ruin in this day will not run the next day. If you see before that the dogs perhaps are not in the best condition, leave them at home. You win a race with the dog in the car, but with the dog in the team which is not possible to make what you have to do this day. The canicross people, I just can say be careful with this hot weather. The climate is changing so much at the moment, which we can see in the last 10 years in this sport. It’s getting warmer and warmer.

JEANETTE: And you actually have proof of this, because you have been tracking your training throughout the years with temperatures and everything.

TOM: In the beginning I was really tracking the trainings with temperature, humidity, how long was the distance, was the ground frozen or was it muddy or raining, whatever, and who was the best dog and who was not so good. I don’t do this now because now I’m training more out of feeling. But at the beginning I say it’s good for everybody who starts with this sport to do something like this, because you can learn a lot out of your mistakes. This is very important.

Let’s say if I see the training tracking 20 years ago, we had minus degrees going in September, and now I’m very lucky if I have minus degrees training in the beginning of December. This changed really a lot. Also, the snow conditions changed a lot, which we can see with the paws. When we started I never used booties because we nearly have always perfect snow. But now, the snow is melting, then freezing again, then it’s raining, then it’s snowing, then it’s freezing again. So take care of the paws because the paws are the things the dogs need for running. The use of booties and paw care cream gets more important, I think, in our bad conditions.

Mostly when I’m on the tracks, they are not perfect anymore, which has nothing to do with that people don’t work on the tracks. They do always the best out of the conditions they have.

JEANETTE: I interrupted you a bit. You started talking about the canicross people and what they have to be aware of.

TOM: The people should know that sometimes it’s better to lose a race or to stop a race, because there will be a next one next week or in two weeks and say, “I don’t give a shit about this weekend. I know my dog has a problem with the heat.”

It’s also individual. Every dog has a problem. There are existing dogs which have no problem, and if you see when the temperature is getting really complicated, around 15 degrees – which I think is already much too high; never touch a dog when it’s over 10 degrees – if you see this, look at the race and think, how could it be that the people who were only tenth place are now winning? This is especially because they have the dog which was not pulling so much all the time, which do not give 100%, always running 90%. But because of this, they don’t have a problem with the heat because they don’t pull so strong, so they don’t overheat so fast.

Also, let’s say you can steer it a little bit with breeding, that you take dogs which have less problems with hot weather. But some people say “breed the perfect dog for this,” but this is not existing. Every dog has a problem with hot weather, or if they have diarrhea, then you cannot say “I have to breed that the dog can run with diarrhea also, perfect.” The super mushers try to tell this to the people, but it’s not the truth.

Every creation on this planet has a limit. You can breed as long as you want; you cannot overstep this limit. Sometimes you have perhaps one individual who is the super superman, but this is very, very close.

The problem in the scene with less dogs, let’s say when the #1 in the four-dog class breeds with #2 in the four-dog class, it will not come out #1 for the six-dog class or for the eight-dog class, because the best dogs for this class were perhaps a little bit limited. They are limited in the distance because of the hard going or because of their big buddies. Mostly, the siblings or the offspring out of this combination has a limit which is even closer.

What we see now is that it’s going steps back. Especially in the middle distance – because the market at the moment for many dogs exists. You have breeders who want to fill this market and earn some money. It is like a business. But be careful of buying too many dogs of these self-called “gods of breeding.” They breed because they know they can sell the dogs. If I have about five or six females in the kennel and breed all six females, this has nothing to do with breeding. You breed your best dog to perhaps the best dog out of the kennel in front of you, or perhaps the one who’s next to you.

But this breeding only in their own kennel to have less expense, but a lot of benefit out of it because the market is there. That’s my opinion, it’s not the best. You can see if you open, for example, the social media, you can see puppies – they have much too much puppies. Always take care of where you buy your dogs and what you buy, not to breed diseases. More and more, I hear that dogs start to get problems with epilepsy or heart problems, and they have problems. They die in training from one step to the next because of a heart attack. Their heart stops working in one to the next minute.

A lot of times it’s a breeding thing because the dogs get more and more limited, and people don’t look for these diseases. They say “I have a champion. He has a problem, but he’s a champion.” The disease problem does