PUPPY LOVE MORPHED INTO LIFE DEVOTED TO CANINES
She’s the first Canadian woman to have finished the Iditarod, the 1,600-kilometre Alaskan dog sled race that takes the mushers and their dog teams over treacherous mountain ranges, desolate tundra and frozen rivers.
This week, though, Karen Ramstead is staying warm and dry at the Calgary Stampede, as she and her border collie Zac compete at the World Stock Dog Championship.
“Zac is way more experienced than I am,” says Ramstead, who describes this newest passion as her retirement project. “He is teaching me as we go along.”
Stock dogs, a staple on most ranches and farms, are those working canines best at herding cattle, sheep and, in some parts of the world, reindeer.
Along with their regular work lives, the best stock dogs and their handlers travel across Canada, the United States and Australia to attend competitions where the agile and intelligent animals are taken through a challenging course with the guidance of their human handlers.
Most of the animal competitors at the Calgary Stampede, says Ramstead, are border collies, famed for not only their acrobatic skills but also being the sharpest of all dog breeds.
“There are some Australian shepherds and Australian kelpies,” says Ramstead of the competition that ran Tuesday and Wednesday at the Nutrien Western Event Centre. “But the rest are all border collies.”
For Ramstead, a former Calgarian who got into stock dog competition three years ago, it’s a big change from her previous sport, one she embarked on two decades ago.
“I always wanted a dog growing up,” she says with a laugh of the genesis of her life’s passion. “But my parents wouldn’t let me, so I got my first one at 19 when I left home.”
A native of Toronto, Ramstead, born Karen Murray, came out west with her parents when she was 12, eventually settling in Calgary. “This is where I spent my formative years,” she says, noting her mom lives in Okotoks. “I grew up around horses and did a lot of horse sports as a kid.”
She married her husband, fellow Calgarian Mark Ramstead, at age 22. The two had many things in common, including a childhood devoid of a pet dog. “We told our parents, several times, they should have just let us have a dog,” she says with a laugh, “then maybe we wouldn’t have wound up with 85 dogs at one point.”
Just how they got to that big number was thanks to Mark getting a job offer in Grande Prairie in the late 1990s. “I wasn’t keen to leave Calgary,” she says, “but Mark said if I came, he’d buy me the pure breed of my choice.”
Her extensive research led Ramstead to a Siberian husky breeder in British Columbia, who took her on a spin on a dog sled. “From the moment I stepped on that sled, I knew it was going to be a big thing in my life.”
The couple moved to the Athabasca area, where they could better train their growing coterie of animals. “People started asking right away if I was going to do the Iditarod,” she says. “That’s like asking a kid in Little League if he’s going to play in the World Series.”
In time, though, that’s exactly what she did, to the tune of 11 Iditarod attempts, five of which resulted in going the entire gruelling distance. “I knew the breed I chose was never going to win the race,” she says, noting the Alaskan husky, an unofficial mixed breed, is the king of sled dogs.
“If we weren’t having a good run, I wasn’t going to stay out there and push my dogs,” she says of the animals she also counts as beloved pets. “It’s totally about the dogs, always has been.”
While she has fond memories of her time in one of the world’s most challenging competitions, Ramstead, now in her 50s, says her newest vocation is more her speed these days.
“It turns out that my love in life isn’t winter sports and freezing to death,” she says with a hearty laugh. “I just really love watching a dog work from its instincts.”
For a woman who spent her childhood years yearning for a dog, Ramstead has more than fulfilled her dreams. “I love my dogs passionately,” she says of her relatively smaller stable of 17 Siberian huskies and three border collies. “I love to see those big, happy grins on their faces — these are my pets and I’m just having fun with them.”