The Alaskan Malamute

[wyatt]

Does anyone have any takes on Malamutes? For me they are a great breed, very ancestral and are incredibly smart. Not much else to describe them otherwise. intelligent, i’d give them that. They seem to be my favorite out of the Spitz, and the Malamute would be the one I would own if I had or wanted to own a Spitz.

[gunb]

I think they're a bit more chilled out and easier to manage than siberian huskies, so that would be a plus as far as owning one. Maybe a good deal less "ancestral" actually.
I always found it interesting that sled dogs in Alaska used to look pretty different, before the Chukchi dogs were imported to alaska in 1908, dog sled teams looked like this-

After 1908 the Chukchi spitz made the "siberian husky", actually created in Alaska and named after the siberian dogs that were imported. The malamute seems to be an attempt to "recreate" the larger bulkier draught dogs of Alaska from before the siberian invasion, but they "misremembered" the bulky alaskan dogs as looking like giant huskies, when they actually didn't. So the malamute is kind of fake, actually. 

Of course the natives of alaska did have a spitz breed for sledding before white people even showed up, but I think it's ancestors are actually the Canadian Eskimo -



Not to be confused with the American Eskimo, which confusingly is actually a german toy breed that recieved a name change during world war 2 for obvious reasons.