The Fan Hitch is the official publication of the Inuit Sled Dog International. It is published four times a year. 
 

Editor-in-Chief : Sue Hamilton
Web Master: Mark Hamilton
Print Version Publisher: Geneviève Montcombroux for Whippoorwill Press

The Fan Hitch is available as a print subscription: in Canada $12.00 Cdn, in USA $7.00 US, elsewhere $18.00 US per year, postage included.  Send requests, with checks payable to "ISDI", to Whippoorwill Press, Geneviève Montcombroux, P.O.Box 206, Inwood, Manitoba, R0C 1P0, Canada. Single copy issues and back issues (if not sold out) are available. Contact Whippoorwill Press for details.

The Fan Hitch welcomes for publication your letters, stories, comments and suggestions. The editorial staff reserves the right to edit all submissions.

Contents of The Fan Hitch are protected by international copyright laws. Neither photos, drawings nor text may be reproduced in any form without written consent. Webmasters please note: written consent is necessary before linking this site to yours! Please forward these requests to Sue Hamilton, 55 Town Line Rd., Harwinton, Connecticut  06791, USA or qimmiq@snet.net

For those of you with internet access and who have specifically book marked the newsletter site, you should know that the Fan Hitch has been moved to a new server. That URL is http://homepage.mac.com/puggiq/. But there’s more! The newsletter now has four times the space of the old server for the same "price" (free!). This means we will now be able to return to the online archives of all the previous issues of the Fan Hitch, back to Volume 1, Number 2 (V 1, N1 was not originally formatted for being online, and we may or may not get to convert that one) . There’s no telling how much we’ll be able to cram into this existing allotted space, but we understand that there is more space available and still for free. So, for the foreseeable future, no matter how much space the archives take, all issues of the Fan Hitch should be readily accessible. I realize that there is not much in this news to titillate those of you who receive the printed version. But this new deal does come with a special way for us to transfer text and high quality images to Geneviève, the print version publisher, in just a fraction of the time it used to and that in itself may facilitate your getting the snail mail edition soon after the online version appears.

The Fan Hitch has been praised for its high content of original articles. But every now and then, we are fortunate to be able to offer our readers some quality material that has appeared in print in another place and another time. Thanks to ISDI Friend, Andrew Bellars, for making his research paper available to us, and to the Natural Environment Research Council (the parent body of the British Antarctic Survey - BAS) for granting us permission to reproduce a somewhat abbreviated version, you are about to get a feel for what life was like for Inuit Dogs in service with the BAS.

This Fan Hitch also presents some serious issues for your consideration: defining the essence of the Inuit dog, the best/right age to begin working Inuit Dogs, those unintended consequences of keeping Inuit Dogs outside of the arctic and the challenges and choices those owners face, and is there a future for our breed?

So once again, the Fan Hitch spans a couple of oceans and continents, wanders above and below the treeline, and stretches across a few time zones and decades, to bring you the length and breadth of what the Inuit Sled Dog was and is. And as you browse through our pages, you can reflect on where the ISD may be headed.
 

Wishing you smooth ice and narrow leads.

Sue