Miki can be a little terror

Titles have a way of being misleading sometimes.  You can look at a newspaper article and expect to read that the President wins a Nobel Peace Prize and when you actually read the article....wait he did win one? Anyway you know what I mean, well this title is in every word not misleading.

Miki, our dog, is an Alaskan Malamute.  He was bred to be a sled puller in the Iditarod.  If you look at a sledding team, his breed will be at the back of the group doing all the hard work.  Getting the sled initially moving and then keeping it flying over the snow.  In this capacity Miki would be the best sled dog ever, he has amazing strength at 16 months and he is quite fast.  Too bad we are not training him to be a sled dog, we want him to be a house dog.  Unfortunately either Miki hasn't figured that out yet, or he just never will.

On our walks Miki is constantly trying to go in one direction or the other pulling us along for the ride.  If he wants to walk on the left hand side of the side walk, he will pull us over to that side, even if it is just for a minute and then we go through the same process on the other side of the walk.  The worst part of it is when he takes off in a sprint after catching the scent of something.  I swear my arm has been pulled out of its shoulder socket many times while trying to rein him in.  He goes from his sniffing position to top speed in one stride, no joke.  It is quite hard to figure out what he is going to do.

At 16 months Miki is still counted as a puppy, but he is a puppy in a grown ups body.  That means that he begs, he whines, he nips, he jumps up on you; anything that you can think a puppy doing he does.  With his frame and weight it makes it almost impossible to keep that in perspective.  I don't know how many times I've lost my cool with him because he is just acting as any puppy would, its just with his size and strength, sometimes his antics physically hurt.

Now don't get me wrong, I love Miki.  Sure there are some times where I wish we would have never bought him, but those are few and far between the times in which I couldn't imagine life without him.  Between his puppy moments are the times where he does just lay there doing nothing, mostly sleeping.  Or when he is playing with his toy and he falls over because the floor is too slick, or he is just whining for us to goto bed so he can goto sleep.  You have to have some bad with the good, it's just that like anything else, you wish the bad was never there.