THE PRICE OF AN ARCTIC ADVENTURE
The winter season continues beyond the Arctic Circle. It is another record-breaking winter, as more tourists visit this region every year. The Far North has more and more to offer. Photographing the Northern Lights, feeding reindeer, whale watching, dog sledding. “Feel the cool breeze on your face as you glide across pristine, snow-covered terrain. Become a musher for a day. These happy dogs will be eager to join your team!” encourages Visit Norway, the official website promoting Norway as a tourist destination. “No one knows exactly how many dogs there are. They appear and disappear”.
I met Magda in the spring of 2024. She worked in one of the tourist resorts in northern Norway. “They kill puppies and any dogs that are no longer strong enough to work. Too many young dogs are born, and the adults are needed as long as they can work. They live for a few years on average because running in such conditions completely wears them out.
Five months ago Magda arrived in the North from Central Europe. She had worked with dogs her entire life, including those that had been through difficult experiences. She knew that sled dogs were treated differently than domestic dogs. They live outside, in kennels, sometimes chained up, in packs.
In tourism, the most used breed is the Alaskan husky, dogs selectively bred and trained to pull sleds. In well-managed kennels the animals are fed regularly, have constant access to water, are allowed daily exercise in an outdoor enclosure, have days off from work, are under veterinary supervision, do not run beyond their strength, and are not afraid of people.
“My manager is a mushing legend, winner of many dog sled races,” she said. “At first, he seemed nice, but I soon realized he was abusive. He has a number of his own dogs that he uses for racing, and he treats them reasonably well, but there are also over fifty Alaskan huskies belonging to the resort. And he takes it out on them. He tells us that we didn’t come to Disneyland, that this is what real life in the North is like. We are younger, so he treats us like morons. On top of that, we are foreigners, second-class citizens. The employees know his methods, but they have agreed to remain silent. In this environment, it is accepted that violence is the only and proper form of training, but that’s nonsense. It takes time to train a dog, and no one has that time because they must serve almost fifty people every day, four trips each. Alaskan dogs are very physically resilient. They can run on injured paws and have high pain tolerance. But they also have fragile mentality. The manager knows this, but he kicks and beats them anyway. Even in front of tourists. He explains to them that this is the only way they will obey. And you know what? People believe it. Because they want to believe it. No one wants to think that they have just paid for someone else’s suffering.
“At the beginning, the tourists decide whether they want to drive themselves or sit in a sled driven by someone from the crew”. I asked Magda to describe what these trips are like. I have ridden dog sleds many times in Spitsbergen and northern Greenland, but these were never commercial trips.
The kennel is a kilometer away and you must walk there. You can already see who is in good shape, because a lot of people overestimate their abilities. Many are older or significantly overweight, which makes it harder for dogs. When they get there, tourists see atmospheric wooden huts and don’t ask about the animals’ living conditions. They’re busy enjoying their Arctic adventure. Everyone gets a warm suit and a short briefing. Those who ride alone are required to run with the dogs, help them uphill, and make sure the sled does not overtake the pack. They nod their heads, but then they don’t follow the instructions anyway, because the most important thing for them is photos and live posts on social media. They lose control of the sled, moving and braking alternately, which strains the dogs’ backs and causes them to run sideways. They are confused, sometimes throwing themselves at each other or stopping and refusing to pull. But most people don’t care about this at all. What’s more, they accuse us of having lazy dogs. “I didn’t pay to run,” Magda often hears. “We are fully booked every day, over forty kilometers on the same route.” It can be done, assuming that dogs have days off. But here they run seven days a week for five months, retracing their own footsteps. At the beginning of the season, they still had energy. They wagged their tails, but in January, they began to slouch, their eyes dull, their ears down, hiding in their kennels. And we pull them out, lead them by their collars to the sled, and the only thing we can say to them is “I’m sorry.”
Magda also told me about Nanook, an old, hard-working dog who suffered from chronic neck pain due to improper pulling. Despite this, he was still regularly harnessed. He was in pain, and the vet suggested euthanasia. “And right there, in the vet’s office, which most dogs are terrified of, I saw him waging his tail for the first time. That day, he stepped outside the bars, outside his daily grind, and everything interested him. It was his last trip. Just before he fell asleep, he ate treats from my hand.
*
We met again a few months later, after Magda had quit her job at the resort. First, she was on long-term sick leave (an accident at work, an injured hand), and on top of that, her nerves were shattered. She talked about her powerlessness in the face of the system. She and her colleagues repeatedly reported abuses to the department’s office, but they were told that the manager knew what he was doing. “We were attached in a sick way. We knew we were part of something evil, but we couldn’t leave,” she admitted. “We were afraid that if we didn’t come to work the next day, we wouldn’t be able to defend any of the dogs. That they wouldn’t be fed or given water. That’s why the decision to strike was so difficult. It was just before the weekend, when occupancy is at its highest. We didn’t come to work, and the manager went on all the trips alone. The dogs were exhausted, the customers were battered, but the most important thing was that the trips took place, because he got a percentage from each one. The strike did not change anything. Before leaving, Magda adopted a dog that had undergone surgery. Previously, he had shunned people, hid, and was distrustful, but he came back to life after a few days. After recovering, he was supposed to return to work, but during treatment it turned out that his shoulder joint was damaged and he could no longer pull. He started working as a seven-month-old puppy, a few months too early. Magda saw more than once that instead of being trained, young dogs were immediately put to work with tourists.
“I couldn’t even take a photo with him in the first two months after adoption. As soon as I took out my phone, he growled and ran away. People kept waving their phones in front of his face at the kennel”.
Marius worked in the same kennel as Magda. He saw animals getting drowned and choked during training. He was raised in Sweden, is a hunter, and has no objection to firmness towards animals, but this was pure cruelty. He began writing regularly to Mattilsynet, the Norwegian Food Safety Authority, which is responsible for animal welfare. They only responded after several months. They came with the police and questioned the employees. The kennel was built on a swamp, which meant that in winter the kennels froze deep into the ice and the dogs slept on the roofs. There was no running water or shelter. One of the officials openly admitted that they could only order an improvement in living conditions but could not influence the exploitation of the animals.
Marius tells that after the season, they managed to raise enough money to transport fifteen dogs who could no longer run, to Germany. After their difficult experiences, not all of them were suitable for adoption, but those who did quickly found good homes. It is difficult to tell from the photos that these are the same dogs. As a sign of a small victory, the employees hung wooden plates with the dogs’ names on the kennel fence. These plates had previously been attached to the doghouses. The manager took them down after a few hours and burned them. Marius kindly asks not to mention his own name in the text. He has heard more than once how employees were threatened that they would be taken to the forest and tied to a tree, as they do with some dogs. Today, he works in a different industry. He will not return to tourism.
*
Kamila made the same decision, even though she loves dogs and has sledding experience from before Norway. Over the past four years, she has worked at three kennels. We meet at her home near Nordkjosbotn, an hour’s drive from Tromsø. At the doorstep, we are greeted by Nora and Drago, dogs she brought with her from Poland. They used to race there. “From the very beginning, I was struck by the fact that the kennels were staffed by people with no experience,” she says. “They didn’t know how to react if something happened during a trip. Everyone was responsible for three sleds, and we were traveling quite a distance.”
Tourists sometimes wanted to turn back on their own because it was minus thirty and they were simply freezing, someone felt ill, there was a heart attack. Anyway, guests often had no idea what they were signing up for. They got off the bus at our place and were asked if they wanted a reindeer, snowshoes, or dogs. Only then did they leaf through the brochures. There were a hundred dogs in the place where she started, and the manager even preferred to hire inexperienced employees. In his opinion, those with experience had too much to say and were often problematic. The guides had one break during the day and worked several hours a day on junk contracts without overtime pay. They were mainly foreigners who were unfamiliar with Norwegian labor law.
Kamila moved from a large kennel to a smaller one. It was a family business, and she assumed that the conditions would be better. She found one inexperienced employee and fifty dogs entangled in chains, lying on plastic shavings instead of straw. She lasted a month.
Over the course of four years, she witnessed many irregularities. Unplanned puppies to be killed, or a bitch that started giving birth during training. They thought she was just fat.
“The best dogs aren’t used for tourism. Only the weak ones, the emotional rejects, go there,” she explains. “The ones in the worst shape and the lame ones didn’t run because it looked bad, but there were times when I heard people say, ‘Oh, that dog is skinny, it looks bad, put a jacket on it.’”
Kamila didn’t see the beating, but she saw its effects.
“It’s easy to get lost in this industry,” she says. “Passion can quickly turn into business. And along the way, you lose sight of what it was all about. If it’s meant to be a product, it should be more expensive, exclusive, not mass-produced,” she wonders what can be done. “A couple lives not far from me; they have sixteen dogs and go on all-day trips several days a week. This already filters out potential customers. During such a trip, the dog gets the right amount of exercise, and the tourist can learn a few things. But I don’t believe that this model is the future of this type of tourism. The money is huge, the day is short. You have to squeeze in as many people as possible. Kamila works at a local supermarket and occasionally helps at another kennel. She intends to study veterinary medicine.
*
Adam had studied human sciences and had been working at a large breeding farm in northern Norway for the past few years. He ended up there by accident. He never had anything to do with dogs before. He wrote in his resume that he knew Japanese because he had studied it at university, and at that time Asian tourists came mainly from Japan. Not yet from China, as is the case now. It was 2018. No one asked him about his experience during the job interview. A short interview via Skype, and after a few months, he received a response.
“I arrived in the spring,” he says. “It was exciting, an adventure, and also a bit of a shock, because everything was new, over three hundred dogs. It took me a while to understand that in this business, dogs are a resource. They taught me how to drive a sled for two weeks and then immediately put me with tourists. The priority was to get as many trips in as possible. We worked five days a week, often 10-11 hours a day. There was a constant shortage of people. I was so exhausted that I slept through my days off. The dogs were also worn out, they didn’t want to pull, they turned towards the kennels. And that’s when the problem started, because the tourists had paid, so they demanded. Violence? I kicked the dogs a few times myself when they were fighting, because if you get between them when they’re in a frenzy, they can tear your hands apart in a second. But I saw other employees choking, shaking, and pinning them to the ground, showing them “who’s in charge”. But it didn’t work. The dogs repeated their behavior because no one was doing any serious training. There was no time for that. It only made them more stressed, but at the time I still thought that more aggressive dogs pulled better.
Adam looks back at the summer, the months of stagnation. Sometimes there was only one person for the entire kennel.
“We would take a few dogs and lead them into the mountains with tourists, if they had booked such a trip. They were so restless that the tourists couldn’t keep up with them,” he says. “We also had a few outdoor enclosures, so every day we would select a group of about twenty dogs and let them out to run around. The rest stood there, waiting, barking, pulling on their chains. There was nothing else we could do.”
During our conversation, Adam repeatedly emphasizes that he does not believe that sled dogs used in tourism are being harmed if they are exercised, treated well, given days off, and are under veterinary supervision. For him, the problem lies with the people. Preying on dreams, six-month contracts, the lowest hourly rate. It is hardly surprising that employees do not have a heart for animals, since they themselves are treated hardly any better than them. Adam left the kennel, although he still volunteers there sometimes. He has observed that the adoption procedure has improved recently, and not all worn-out dogs are euthanized. However, it is still not the standard he would like to work with. He himself adopted a dog from that kennel right at the beginning. They spent seven years together. He buried him at the end of last year. For now, he is not ready for another one. He works on a construction site, they pay well, all the benefits are good, he leaves work feeling calm.
*
The topic of husky safaris extends beyond Norway’s borders. In northern Sweden I meet Annette. She is the only veterinarian within an eighty-kilometer radius and has no idea how many dogs there might be in her area. In the small village of Slussfors, where she lives, there are over a hundred, so there must be thousands. The terrain is vast, the kennels are scattered, and access is difficult. This is why mass tourism in northern Sweden is just getting started.
“Most local companies offer trips lasting several days, there’s no such thing as short-distance trips,” she explains. “We don’t get as many tour groups as in Norway, where dog sledding is available as an optional activity for cruise tourists”.
“The worst thing is that today, hotel managers who know nothing about dogs are jumping into this business,” she says. “They buy a pack and then hire someone who claims to be an expert. The hotel doesn’t have the time or the tools to check this, so in practice, the dogs have no owner. The caretaker is an employee, not the owner. Responsibility becomes blurred,” she explains.
“And that’s one scenario. There are also cases where kennel owners have good intentions, but at some point, it gets out of hand. So, they often do what they think is right. Veterinary assistancerequires a long commute, costs are rising, so they try to treat the dogs on their own. And that doesn’t always work. The dogs die, but they don’t know why, and they learn nothing from it.
Annette knows that plenty of owners kill their dogs themselves. She explains that Swedish law allows it and even specifies how and which weapons can be used, depending on the dog’s age. “Animals must not be killed by exposure to carbon monoxide, ether, chloroform, freezing, or other methods that cause unnecessary suffering. Puppies younger than 14 days may be killed by a strong blow to the head. The blow must be delivered with such force and precision that it causes immediate loss of consciousness and death,” he quotes the guidelines from the Swedish National Board of Agriculture.
“The dogs they bring to me are the lucky ones. I’ve seen tumors on their legs the size of fists, wounds that haven’t healed for months, terrible neglect. I dread to think about what happens to those I never get to see. The challenge is that huskies are extremely resilient,” she emphasizes.
“They try not to show their pain and just survive. This makes it easier for their owners to say that they are fine. Sometimes they really don’t see anything wrong, and other times they see it and do nothing about it.” In commercial kennels, dogs often get injured due to improper handling of the sleds. This also affects them psychologically, because riding is painful and uncomfortable for them. We constantly hear that they love to run. This is true. However, few people are imaginative enough to think that these are intelligent animals and that constantly running the same few kilometers simply bores them to death.
I asked Annette what a tourist can do if they decide to go on such a trip. “It’s best not to go at all. I think these ‘all-inclusive’ trips should be banned. It’s like riding elephants or petting tigers. If someone is genuinely interested in dogs and wants to spend a few days learning about them at a smaller company, they should simply ask: How many dogs do you have? Do they have time to run freely? Where are the older dogs? And lastly: Do you have a veterinarian?
*
“Of course, we have a partner clinic in Ivalo, thirty kilometers away,” says Monika, co-owner of a kennel in northern Finland. “Our kennel also employs an animal welfare officer, who is a girl with veterinary experience. Employees report to her if they see anything disturbing. We have constant supervision.” There are two hundred dogs. Thirty percent are kept on chains, and the rest are in kennels, mainly Alaskan huskies. Monika and her husband Maciej have been running the kennel for almost ten years. They started by organizing multi-day dog sledding expeditions in the area, transporting dogs from Poland, but eventually found the right place north of the Arctic Circle and settled there permanently. They employ twelve people, mainly Poles. Monika emphasizes that 80 percent of the staff has remained the same since the beginning. The company continues to organize multi-day expeditions and has also expanded its range to include short safaris for tourists. They cooperate with a large hotel in the area.
“For now, we don’t have enough demand for the dogs to work every day. Tourists mainly come in the winter, but we work all year round.” Inspections? “At least once a year, they are unannounced and very detailed,” she explains. “A veterinarian, or sometimes two, goes through the kennel, inspects the entire infrastructure and the dogs, and then we receive a report. If they have any concerns, they give us time to make improvements. Every dog must be registered in the state registry, and every movement related to the dog – sale, adoption, death – must be recorded.”
Older dogs? Dogs being killed after the season? “Most dogs live peacefully in the kennel until old age,” adds Maciej. “We have a dedicated section of the facility for retired dogs, with a heated building and specially prepared kennels.” Maciej estimates that in almost thirty years of work, he has only decided to euthanize a few dogs, and never because of their age. “We don’t do that here,” he emphasizes. Sometimes dogs are put up for adoption, mainly in Poland.
Violence? I ask because I have heard reports of terrible conditions in Finnish kennels. “Those must be rumors,” says Monika. “We do not use violence. It is contrary to our ethics. We have never had anyone who was aggressive towards dogs. There may be situations where an extreme measure is necessary, but it is not a method we use.”
The company sometimes gets emails from tourists asking about animal welfare. They tell them the truth. During our interview, Monika admits that there are no certificates or tools that tourists can use to check whether companies meet the requirements and whether what they write about themselves on their websites is true.
*
Nina also receives messages. They are from former or current kennel employees or people interested in the subject. That’s how she met Magda, Marius, and Annette. She started out as a kennel manager years ago, but after what she experienced, she promised herself she would never stand on sleds again. She runs an animal shelter in Ivalo. She showed me articles about husky safaris that recently appeared in the Finnish press. In the largest daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, the article was titled “Dogs are treated like snowmobiles.” By comparison, the Swedish media cover the topic sporadically, and in Norway I found only one article from 2014 in Nordlys, in which a former employee of one of the kennels reported to Mattilsynet that dogs were being shot and their bodies buried in the forest.
Nina witnessed how the owner of the kennel where she worked packed dogs, he had shot himself into black bags and threw them in the trash. “In some parts of northern Finland, the situation is really bad,” she says. “The industry has grown so fast that supervision can’t keep up. The ones here had been traveling nonstop for days,” she says, playing a recording from inside the bus. Cages stacked on top of each other, dogs standing on straw scraps or bare bars.”The owner was transporting them from France to northern Finland. They came from cheap breeders without documents, vaccinations, or deworming. They traveled for many days. Several of them died afterwards. This is not an isolated case of such transport.
Last fall, SEY Suomen Eläinsuojelu Yhdistys, Finland’s largest animal rights organization, published a video about husky safaris on its website. The video shows paralyzed dogs on chains, female dogs immobilized after giving birth with their puppies in metal cages, open wounds, and dead dogs in bags. There is more evidence, and employees in this industry are becoming increasingly vigilant. With their help, it is possible to expose bad practices to kennels. Nina also points to the lack of system-wide cooperation between the Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian authorities, as suspects often move to neighboring countries, start a business under a different name, and the fate of the dogs remains unchanged. Many choose Norway.
I would like to ask for their thoughts on NOAH, Norway’s largest animal rights organization. Its director, Siri Martinsen, states outright that the welfare of sled dogs is not being adequately monitored. They have no knowledge of the current situation of these dogs. They base their findings on the Mattilsynet report from 2018/19, when a state inspection of 323 kennels was carried out. Irregularities were found in 25% of cases. Martinsen emphasizes that dogs’ rights are important, such as introducing mandatory identification and finally banning the practice of keeping them on chains.
I ask Mattilsynet to explain how often they respond to reports and what progress has been made in improving the fate of dogs used in tourism. In response to my email, I read that all reports of abuse are read and assessed, and the most serious ones are verified through inspection or a phone call. Yes, indeed, the last major inspection was seven years ago. Senior advisor Ane Ramskjær does not explain why, despite the detection of many irregularities and the rapid development of mass tourism, the inspection has not been repeated. She also does not mention whether the improvement in conditions in those 25% has been verified. However, she writes: “Work continues introducing mandatory registration for all dogs. At this point, however, we cannot say when this requirement will be introduced”.
I contacted the tourist resort where Magda worked and requested a comment on the allegations made by former employees. “We are not aware of what you are describing,” comes the reply from the CEO after a few weeks. He is a new CEO, a local businessman who owns dozens of hotels across Scandinavia. In the following sentences, however, he admits that there were complaints about the former manager, so they replaced him with someone else. They also invested in a new enclosure, spending millions of crowns, and there is no doubt that dogs now have a wonderful life.
I ask for a statement from that manager. I know he now works at the kennel where Kamila started. He only has his own dogs there and organizes two trips a day. He denies everything that happened at the resort. That place was bad, not him. I can come and see for myself how much the dogs love him. He talks a lot and fast. Those foreigners have it in for him. Vegetarians and LGBT people will teach him how to live, he emphasizes twice during a ten-minute phone conversation.
Magda now lives in southern Norway with her dog. She works for a small family-run tourism company. There is no dog sledding tourism in the south yet, but she has heard that many local businesses are already planning to invest in dogs. Since they already have the northern lights and reindeer, it will be a complete package. They will figure it out. They can always hire experienced workers from the north.
It’s been a year and a half since she left that kennel. She hasn’t forgotten the other dogs. Especially one. She hopes he’s still alive. And that she’ll be able to take him away from there soon.
“For the first year, you can’t sleep, everything comes back to you, you’re there all the time. The second year, you get used to your powerlessness in the situation, you gain some distance,” she says. “I don’t want to start a culture war. For the people of the North, it’s a tradition and they won’t stop doing it. The only thing I won’t stop fighting for is the introduction of restrictions on commercial kennels, because otherwise it will never end. Dogs need labor rights.”
Ever since she heard at the resort that slaughtered sled dogs become the northern lights after death, she stopped looking at the sky.
Apart from Marius, two of the characters in this article asked for their names to be changed.
The article was originally published in Duży Format – reportage magazine of Gazeta Wyborcza.