And you thought this was another Cheney/Lawyer joke. Really, haven't we had enough of those already?
No, I'm spending the long weekend up here in Estes Park, and the town was the site yesterday of one of the local World's Strongest Dog competitions. I walked down from the motel to go see, and surprisingly, about 100 people had turned out to watch.
The idea is pretty simple: harness up a dog and see how much weight he can pull. Evidently, pretty much any dog will pull, although after the Shih-Tzus are finished, they use them as the incremental weights for the Labs.
Labs? Labs, you say? Yes. Labs. Sage would probably look at me and wonder why, if I wanted the cart over there, I didn't pull it there myself.
It turns out that the owner is allowed to stand at the finish line and encourage his dog, but can't actually touch the dog. (There's virtually no risk of injury; apparently a dog will run until his heart explodes, but won't pull a weight he thinks is too heavy, so he just sits down and waits for his treat.) The bull terriers and elk hounds and boxers waited until the owner got to the line.
The labs, as soon as they say their handler starting to walk away, started whining and crying and jumping up and down. "OK, fine, you want to be with me? Walk over here, then." At one point, the handler used the shopping mall trick, well-known to all lab-owners and parents of 5-year-olds: continuing to walk away.
One lab managed to pull 780 pounds. He can pull 2005 pounds on wheels. Evidently, dogs with severe separation anxiety do well in this sport.
