In Whitehorse – in the stores, at the ski club, even in church – pooches are people too . . . By Katharine Sandiford

Cancel your lap-swim. Forget aqua-fit. Get out of the wading pool. That is, unless you want to emerge from the water covered in scratches and coated with fur. For just this one day, Whitehorse’s multi-million-dollar, world-class swimming pool is open only to dogs. And there’s more than 100 of them here, barking, leaping, splashing, fetching and generally having a good time. The decks are crowded with pant-soaked owners, and they’re at least as delighted as their pets.

A tiny terrier cross named Sadie runs and leaps into the deep end. She’s wearing her canine lifejacket and custom-fit “doggles” – a water mask for dogs – so she can swim around in circles for as long as she likes. Melissa Atkinson and her mother, Jessie Sidney, brought Sadie here. “I think we’re becoming crazy dog people,” Atkinson says. “But she just means so much to our family. It’s unconditional love. Like, how can you be that happy all the time?” Sadie’s up on the pool-deck now, shaking off the water and wagging her tail – no, her whole body – with glee.

It’s the day before the pool’s routine maintenance-closure, when Canada Games Centre staff drain the water and scrub down the Olympic-sized tank, water slide, hot tub and wading pool. “It takes a bit to get all the hair out,” says Sasha Sywulsky, who runs the pool and organizes the dog swim. “But it’s all worth it.” Owners paid a donation to participate, together raising over $1,000 for the Mae Bachur Animal Shelter.

Unorthodox? Not really. In Whitehorse, every dog has its day every day. More than any other city in Canada, the Yukon’s capital goes out of its way to accommodate its canine companions. They’re everywhere, proudly participating in civic life alongside their owners in places most cities wouldn’t tolerate. You’ll find them at dinner parties, on the ski club trails, inside shops and offices – even lying reverentially beside their masters at church. With an average of one dog per household and plenty of room to romp leash-free, Whitehorse may well be the world’s mecca for mutts.

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Fifteen dogs frolic around Monika Melnychuk’s backyard. Only a few are still wearing their paper party hats – most have torn them off and trampled them. A handful are wrestling, a few are competing over a bone, the shy ones are watching from the side, and others – three, in fact – are humping. “It’s time for the meatcakes!” Melnychuk shouts, corralling the beasts and their owners into a wavy line. They’re here for a birthday party for Boogie, Melnychuk’s amber-coated, nine-year-old vizsla. To celebrate, she’s mixed up a batter of chunky tinned dog food, flour, eggs and oats, and then baked the glop in decorative paper cups. She places one before each drooling guest and within seconds her handiwork is ingested, paper and all. Next she pulls out a giant drawing of a donkey – a good one, too; she's a freelance illustrator for the likes of SunChips and the New York Times. But this is no ordinary pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Melnychuk produces a long, skinny pepperoni stick from a crinkly package and spikes it in place on the donkey’s bottom. “Okay, go!” The first dog to the meat gets to eat it. The humans in attendance – Melnychuk’s closest friends – laugh, drink beers and snap photos as the dogs tussle and frisk.

“It’s true. This is the best place for dogs,” Melnychuk says, recounting how when she lived in Kitchener, Toronto and Los Angeles, she would have to drive for miles just to find a good place to walk Boogie and her other vizsla, Sid. “It’s doggy paradise here. I can take them everywhere I go.” Her boyfriend, Jonah Clark, even brings their pups to work some mornings. They follow him on his forested bike ride into Icycle Sport, a ski and bike shop where he’s manager and where other employees can bring their mutts, too, so the dogs and their owners can hang out all day. There’s even a dog-only sofa at the back of the shop.

It’s tempting to think that Whitehorse’s dog obsession is a product of the recent rise in pet trendiness worldwide – a phenomena manifested by everything from big-box pet shops to chic urban dog cafes. But in the Yukon, the roots of canine-madness reach back much further. Mushing is where the territory’s love affair with dogs began. Anyone who’s read Jack London’s Call of the Wild knows how fictional furball Buck, the super-mutt, became the mascot for the Klondike gold rush in 1898. Dogs like him were rounded up, shipped north and sold to stampeders, who used them to pull gear over mountain passes to the Yukon goldfields. Before that, for centuries, First Nations people ran dogs. And until the construction of the Alaska Highway in the ’40s, RCMP officers, mailmen, trappers, traders and pretty much anyone needing to travel distances in the Yukon winter had a team of huskies.

So it’s no wonder that front and centre on the Yukon flag there stands a proud Malamute sled dog. In fact, he’s posed atop the coat of arms, head high, tail up – in doggy language, he’s dominating the flag. This is unique. Around the world, almost no flags feature dogs – “surely none as prominent as the Yukon’s,” says Minnesota-based flag expert Lee Harold. “I was surprised to discover this. Man’s best friend is pretty much ignored in our most important symbols. So, hurrah for the Yukon!”

And dogs are familiar symbols elsewhere in the Yukon, too. Lead Dog Ale is the name of Yukon Brewing’s most celebrated beer, which scooped first place at a prestigious ale competition in England last year. On the brewery’s website they write, “This brew doesn’t leap out and bite you,” and then compare its character to that of a husky. Anyone from Whitehorse knows exactly what they’re talking about.

Lawyers and spouses Pippa Lawson and Lawrence Purdy moved to Whitehorse one year ago from Ottawa. In part, they came for Whitehorse’s dog-friendliness. “This is definitely the dog capital of Canada,” says Lawson, a pony-tailed brunette. “The fact that you can take dogs on the ski trails was a huge attraction.” She’s an elite cross-country ski racer; twice she’s won the Keskinada Loppet, Canada’s best-known long-distance race. She’s glided down most of Canada’s top ski trails and found Whitehorse’s club to be the only national-level facility that permits dogs. And it’s not just a short run. Lawson and her shepherd-cross Tira get to ski on more than 25 kilometres of immaculately groomed trails. Mike Gladish, the club’s director, likes it that way. “It wasn’t a conscious decision to welcome dogs,” he says. “It just evolved.” One third of the club’s 1,000 members ski with dogs a few times a week, and half do so a few times a season. Banning dogs, says Gladish, would be out of the question. “Just as long as they follow the rules and pick up after their pets,” he warns. Baggie dispensers and garbage receptacles dot the first kilometre of the dog trail.

In Whitehorse, even if you’re not into skiing, you don’t have to go far to hit the trails with you dog. An extensive trail network is within 100 metres of nearly every back porch. These greenspace paths allow dogs throughout the city to do plenty of off-leash romping. “It’s not just going around the block on the sidewalk, on a leash,” says Lawson. “You can let them run. That’s what dogs need to do to be healthy and balanced.” And everywhere she goes, Lawson says, she’s astounded at just how many dogs of various sizes and breeds she sees. She spots them hanging out of car windows, walking down the street, tied up outside shops, swimming in the river. There’s street-level acceptance, she says. “Not everyone here is dog-tolerant, but I think it’s a much higher level then anywhere else I’ve seen. People here really love their dogs.”

Nothing illustrates this puppy love better than the case of Trevor – a local dog who’s captured a global audience. This sweet-faced mutt was found last January starving, with a chain grown into his neck. In May, he was adopted from the Mae Bachur animal shelter by a woman who soon passed him over to her brother. For the first time, Trevor showed aggression, bit three people, and was given to the city pound, where he was scheduled to be euthanized. That’s where local animal-rights activist Kevin Sinclair stepped in. He filed for a temporary injunction, and, in August, appeared in Yukon Supreme court. It was the first time in the Yukon’s history a dog’s fate was to be determined by the territory’s high court. Sinclair argued that Trevor’s owner breached the adoption agreement and should have returned him to the shelter rather than give him away to her brother. The dog deserves a second chance, he said. Justice Ron Veale agreed, but ordered a series of evaluations – still ongoing – to determine Trevor’s potential for rehabilitation. Google “Trevor the Dog” and you’ll see how this story has caught fire in news, blog entries and discussion boards the world over. Even Caesar Milan of TV’s The Dog Whisperer has commented about Trevor on his website. Canine-crazed Yukoners are crossing their fingers that Milan might come up to tape a special about Trevor.

Last month, a couple travelling through Whitehorse lost their dog downtown. The city went on high alert. Thanks to the cab drivers, cops, letter carriers and other people who heard the radio announcements, the dog was quickly found. Everyday, at midday, anyone listening to Whitehorse’s commercial radio station CKRW will hear the Pet Report. “You hear that stupid music come on, ‘ching, chooka ching ching,’” laughs local dog-musher Susie Rogan. “Oh God, here comes the Pet report again. You sit there for three minutes listening to, ‘In the lost category we have a black and white mixed-breed named Speckles.’ And then every now and then you get, ‘We interrupt regular programming to announce that somebody has lost a brown dog on Fourth Avenue.’ What other city will interrupt their radio show to announce stuff like this?”

In 1993, when Rogan moved up from Ontario with a drooling beagle named Sniffy, she had no idea that 15 years later she’d own 70 dogs and race them for a living. She and her celebrity-musher boyfriend, Hans Gatt, live on a huge property in Goldenhorn, only three kilometres from the Whitehorse’s city-limits (in town, they’d have to shrink their dog-count to nine). For at least a decade, Rogan was the city’s skijoring queen. She won most local races, getting pulled at highway speeds by two or three of her dogs, on skis, down winding racecourses. “It’s kind of like the best Disney ride you could ever get,” she says. “You’re on your own, whipping through the trees, around corners, up and down hills.” But then she and her 10 dogs met Yukon Quest champion Gatt and his 60 dogs. Soon, she was riding the rails behind a sled, helping operate the kennel with her sweetheart and, this year, competing in the Yukon Quest 300. Right from their backyard they can train their giant teams on Whitehorse’s suburban trail network. Gatt, in the summertime, can be found on his dirtbike, 10 dogs chasing him along a single-track trail beside the Yukon River. Rogan prefers exercising her dogs in the summer by competing in the local “dryland” races, where participants let one, two or three harnessed dogs pull them on their bike or while running. “It’s a hoot,” she says.

Rogan and Gatt are just two of Whitehorse’s nearly 100 kennel owners – people who keep anywhere from three to 100 sled dogs for recreational or professional races, leisurely sled rides, or to pull equipment or supplies on multi-day trips in the backcountry. But while these animals are working dogs, that doesn’t mean their owners don’t coddle them. Just visit the Whitehorse-area homes of Yukon Quest pros Sebastian Schnuelle or Hugh Neff and you’ll have trouble finding space on the sofa for all the huskies sprawled out.

Some people, of course, would rather not have their dogs pull them. That’s why local trainer Roseanne Konrad developed her one-of-a-kind, Whitehorse-specific course called Training on the Trails. In it, she goes beyond the sit, stay and heel of most obedience classes. Instead, she teaches dogs to follow on their owner’s heels (for ease of travel up skinny trails), and to come when called while off-leash and distracted. Konrad knows Whitehorse is a pooch paradise, but also knows if owners don’t train their dogs properly, ugly situations can arise. She also thinks there’s a kind of sloppy arrogance and sense of entitlement among many Whitehorse dog owners. “People in town still think it’s fine to let their dogs out the door to do their business on anybody’s lawn,” she says. “That’s pretty shocking to me. People would never do this in the south. Maybe in the 1950s.” In Whitehorse, the four private dog-training instructors continue teach at-capacity classes, even maintaining waiting lists. The demand for instruction is huge.

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Only good dogs are allowed to go to church. Every summer, the Whitehorse United Church opens its doors to four-legged creatures for the Blessing of the Animals service. This year, 20 of the 70-strong congregation brought along their dogs – and a few cats – who obediently curled up alongside the wooden pews or in their owners’ laps. Except for one dog that howled during the singing of a hymn, they were quiet through the opening prayers and sermon. “Animals teach us a lot about faith,” says minister Heather Rogers. “If we could have faith in God like our pets have faith in us, then we would really know what faith is about.” Then, one by one, the pets were led up the aisle to be blessed. Rogers spent a few minutes with each pet, learned their names, then softly wrapped her elegant hands around their fuzzy heads for the recital of a spiritual blessing. Some owners walked up with photos of deceased dogs to be blessed, too. “People of the North love their pets so much,” Rogers says. “In Whitehorse people like nature. The environment is important to them. The non-human world is important. Dogs aren’t just dogs in Whitehorse. They are someone special.”