How to Be Good to a Husky: The Cheat Sheet
Everything I learned from Stud, boiled down. Not training. Trust, exercise, food, cold, and the things you should never do.
This is the short version of everything on this site. Stud was not a normal dog and I am not a trainer. This is just what worked for twelve years with a husky who would disown you if you treated him poorly.
The pledge
- Don’t be an idiot.
- Don’t ever leave your dog inside a car when it is warm. Not a minute.
- Don’t walk them on hot pavement. It burns pads fast.
- Don’t jerk on their leash. It can hurt their neck.
- Don’t leave a dog crated for too long.
- Make sure they always have water.
It’s not training
- Almost everyone trains their dog based on dominance. I’m here to tell you I didn’t. It wasn’t training.
- Huskies are too intelligent for conventional training. Yelling, pushing, or forcing just makes it worse. It sent most people into a spiral.
- If you punish him, he will do it again, and not only that, he will go fully rogue.
- Communicate clearly what you want or don’t want. For the most part I just had to explain it and show him once: no or yes, bad or good.
- The solution was simple: time together, exercise, love and communication.
- It is a mutual friendship. Not “I own him and he listens to me.” He listened to me, and I listened to him.
- Would you want to return if you knew you would be punished? Never yell at them when they come back.
- Long story short, he trained me not to be an asshole.
Read the whole story in Puppy Days and Stud’s Personality.
Exercise is not optional, it is medicine
- Not walks. Running. Huskies were built to run 50-ish miles a day in the Arctic. That drive does not disappear because they live in a suburb.
- A real run every single day. Not a 20 minute walk around the block. Off leash, a long bike ride alongside them, a trail hike.
- It is not fair to a husky to “walk” them. They need freedom to run. That is why I bought a mountain bike.
- Most of the behavioral problems people blame on the breed, the destruction, the howling, the refusal to listen, trace back to not enough physical output. If your husky seems like a handful, look at the exercise first.
- Exercise before meals. A tired husky is a hungry husky.
Off leash
- For the first year and a half I kept him on a leash. Then little by little off leash in fenced-in parks. By two he was mostly off leash.
- A dog door and a fenced-in yard is a game changer.
- Long line for safety while you build recall. If “come” is poisoned, use a new cue.
- Don’t chase, don’t punish the recall.
- Whenever something ran, he went into kill mode. Know your dog’s prey drive before you trust it near roads.
Full plan in My Husky Won’t Come Inside.
Food
- Kibble varies enormously. The cheap stuff is heavily processed, full of fillers, and huskies specifically seem to tolerate it poorly. They know the difference.
- I cooked for him. Chicken thighs, salmon, ground beef, steak, liver, stew meat. Cook in bulk, portion it out, store it, like meal prep for yourself.
- Whenever I cooked I made two times as much so he could eat.
- RO or filtered water.
- Skipping a meal is normal for a husky. Put the bowl down. Walk away. Try again tomorrow.
More in My Husky Won’t Eat and Holistic Health.
Heat and cold
- Huskies are built for cold, not heat. No running when it’s hot out. If they start to slow down, they are telling you something, and it could be dangerous.
- Never shave a husky. The double coat insulates both ways. Shaving it can damage the coat permanently.
- The colder, the better. Minus-degree temps were his paradise.
- But their coat isn’t magic. Winter camping at zero degrees, he was shivering with his coat not fully grown in. He slept in my sleeping bag. Check on them.
- Damp climates: pads can get yeast infections. Dog boots, then a bath with baking soda or Epsom salt.
Coat
- Brush regularly. An undercoat rake or a slicker brush, and a de-matting brush with razors on one side is a lifesaver.
- Bathe a few times a year, not more. No strong-smelling or human shampoo, it dries their coat out.
- When they blow their coat it is trash bags of fur. That is normal.
Chemicals
- I never put chemicals in the yard or around the house, and rarely in it. Research everything you give them and everything around them.
- Fleas: Dawn dish soap and diatomaceous earth, not chemicals.
- Ticks: cedar chips where they lay, DE, and check them. Michigan and the East are horrible for ticks. Out west they were not as bad.
- I hated the topical flea and tick meds and used them maybe a dozen times in twelve years.
Know your dog
- Huskies do not show pain the way other dogs do. They are stoic. You have to pay attention to subtle changes.
- Learn their normal: their eyes, how they carry themselves, how interested they are in food, their energy on a given day. That baseline is what lets you notice something is wrong before it becomes a crisis.
- He would tell me every day at 4:15, let’s go. Listen when they tell you things.
If they are sick, go to When Your Husky Is Sick.