Growing up in upstate New York, Kriya Dunlap’s family were the oddball neighbors. Daughter to musher Harris Dunlap, she grew up with 150 dogs on her family’s property.
Today, Kriya Dunlap is an associate professor of biology and chemistry at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
As a girl, she watched her father travel across the country for dog sled racing, including to Alaska. In the 1980s, he started to notice something strange about his dogs during races.
“They stove up,” Dunlap said. “They kind of like, like, cramp[ed] up.”
So her father consulted a nutritionist who told him that what was happening with his dogs was common in race horses when they were fed a certain diet.
“What had happened in canine nutrition was during industrialization is they treated canines like humans, and they fed them a grain-based diet,” Dunlap said.
It’s now known that dogs need more proteins and fats than humans do. Today, many dog owners don’t buy dog kibble if the first ingredient isn’t a meat product. And in his travels, Dunlap’s dad was seeing this nutrition model working firsthand.
“My dad was going up to Alaska and racing, and he was racing against a lot of Alaska Natives,” Dunlap recalled. “None of them had the same issues that he did. And they were all feeding meat.” Meat, like salmon and moose, caught by the mushers themselves.
‘Salmon crunchers’
A bilingual television feature called Qimugciyaraq: Yuungnaqutek'lallrat, Dogs as a Livelihood produced by KYUK in 1981 featured Akiak elders Lott Egoak and Alfred Lake sitting by a woodstove, recounting the way they’d relied on dogs in their lifetimes.
“I fed the dogs anything frozen, lush frozen white fish and dried king salmon,” Egoak said, over clips of a musher cutting up sections of dried fish. “I included the salmon roe when making dog food, anything black fish, even we used to hunt food for the dogs, and got plenty of it so we would not run out until summer.”
Egoak talked about filling a pit in the ground with salmon to store for the dogs. The fish were plentiful.
“When they had high protein food, the dogs were strong,” the Elder recalled. “They could pull a 14-foot sled that was fully loaded.”
Fairbanks-based musher Carl Erhart said that not long ago, people would refer to their canines as ‘salmon crunchers.’
“The dog would literally eat so much salmon that they would smell like a fish,” Erhart said.
Today, it's rare to find a dog team fed on a diet of mainly fish. And according to Erhart, the crux of the change is supply.
“The biggest thing that I've experienced and the biggest thing that's affecting the Alaska sled dog, the mushers of Alaska, and also the humans of Alaska, especially the Indigenous peoples of Alaska, is the salmon crisis right now,” Erhart said.
The decline in salmon populations throughout the state has been steep, especially in the Yukon River, which faced its fifth year of near-total salmon fishing closures this past year.
Though there are likely many factors at play in the reason why salmon aren’t returning to the rivers to spawn, the changing environment's warming of ocean waters is among those at the forefront.
Erhart grew up fishing for his family’s dogs on the Yukon, in Tanana. That’s no longer the case.
“And so ultimately, with that huge food source being taken away from us, so many people have gotten out of dogs and given up their dog kennels, and people along the river don't fish anymore,” Erhart said.
Side-by-side
Erhart’s kennel in Fairbanks has been part of research conducted by Kryia Dunlap, the biology professor from UAF.
Part of Dunlap’s research is based on the premise that humans and canines have co-evolved. And, living side-by-side throughout their histories, the two are exposed to the same environments.
In the Arctic, Dunlap said this link is especially distinct, where dogs and humans traditionally both ate a subsistence diet.
“They rely on eating fin fish, mostly salmon and white fish, “ Dunlap said. “They'll feed their dogs, and that's the same food that the humans are eating, too.”
In Alaska, especially in the wintertime, humans are bundled in coats and dogs have fur that keeps the sun from reaching their skin. It turns out, both humans and dogs got Vitamin D from a diet heavy in salmon.
“And it all comes from eating the whole animal,” Dunlap said. “There'd be vitamin D in salmon.”
Dunlap’s research found that a supplementation of wild salmon to sled dog diets showed an increase in vitamin D levels in dogs along the Yukon River. Though the shortage of salmon has even impacted the way she can carry out her studies.
“I had gotten salmon from the Yukon before for research,” Dunlap said. “And because the runs have been so bad, the harvests were closed in so many places, and so I had to switch my salmon source, which is definitely climate change.”
Kibble comes at a cost
With less subsistence salmon around, dogs today rely on nutrient-rich kibble to get their vitamin supply. But while nutritionally adequate, it comes at an economic cost. A 40lb bag of kibble can go for $80 in rural Alaska, and that can last less than a day for even a smaller kennel.
“There’s been less and less dog mushers and I’m certain that it’s because of the cost, “ Dunlap said. “And so you're starting to see a lot more of what they call microkennels.”
In a way, the salmon crisis has spurred a return of sorts to mushing’s roots of keeping small teams, traditionally 3-6 dogs for transportation. Today, it’s common for competitive mushers to have upwards of 30 dogs in their kennels. There being more mouths to feed has been part of the shift away from a salmon-based diet.
Former Bethel-based musher, Myron Angstman, said that the struggles of keeping a fish diet in today’s climate can influence what kind of kennel you manage.
“It certainly is a factor in how many dogs you can keep, and perhaps the type of dog that you keep,” Angstman said. “In the early time when I had dogs, there was a huge amount of fish being fed by me and others, and actually, I stayed on that fish diet longer than most because I had such a steady supply of fish.”
He said in Bethel, he would stock fish from the city’s test fishery’s overflow bin. Angstman said not every kind of dog can thrive on a fish diet – it’s not as black and white as that. Breeding and genetics play a role, and some of the modern breeds have a different caloric demand than the work dogs of the earlier days.
But overall, the climate-induced shift away from a fish-based diet has changed how dogs are kept, and who can keep them. The link between man and his best friend has reverberations reflected in the modern iteration of the sport. Under the care of human hands, dogs are eating less salmon because people are catching and consuming less of it.
And there’s also another vital component to dog sled racing that’s changing with the climate.
“This on-snow sport is already disappearing because of climate change,” UAF biologist Kriya Dunlap said. “So for instance, in the lower 48 last year, there were no on-snow races.”
In the next installment of our ‘A Changing Trail’ series, we’ll look at the climate impacts on the race courses themselves and how mushers are adapting to compete in a set of conditions that differ from those of the work dog’s time.
This story is part of a series looking at the development of sled dog racing and the impact of climate change on mushing in the lead-up to the 2025 K300 race on February 7. Stay tuned for the next part of the series on KYUK 640AM and online at KYUK.org.
