It may be that these conditions are more natural to them than any other, and that they are warmer when covered by the drifted snow than they would be in any unwarmed shelter:  but this I doubt.  At any rate they throve exceedingly under these rigorous conditions, soon becoming fat and healthy after the hardest sledge journeys, and their sledging record is a very fine one.  We could not have built them a hut; as it was, we left our magnetic hut, a far smaller affair, in New Zealand, for there was no room to stow it on the ship.  I would not advise housing dogs in a hut built with a lean-to roof as an annexe to the main living-hut, but this would be one way of doing it if you are prepared to stand the noise and smell.

The dog-biscuits, provided by Spratt, weighed 8 oz. each, and their sledging ration was 11/2 lbs. a day, given to them after they reached the night camp.  We made seal pemmican for them and tried this when sledging, as an occasional variation on biscuit, but they did not thrive on this diet.  The oil in the biscuits caused purgation, as also did the pemmican:  the fat was partly undigested and the excreta were eaten.  The ponies also ate their excreta at times.  Certain dogs were confirmed leather eaters, and we carried chains for them:  on camping, these dogs were taken out of their canvas and raw-hide harnesses, and attached to the sledge by the chains, care being taken that they could not get at the food on the sledge.  When sledging, Amundsen gave his dogs pemmican but I do not know what else:  he also fed dog to dog:  I do not know whether we could have fed dog to dog, for ours were Siberian dogs which, I am told, will not eat one another.  At Amundsen’s winter quarters he gave them seal’s flesh and blubber one day, and dried fish the next.[283] On the long voyage south in the Fram, he fed his dogs on dried fish, and three times a week gave them a porridge of dried fish, tallow, and maize meal boiled together.[284] At Cape Evans or at Hut Point our dogs were given plenty of biscuit some evenings, and plenty of fresh frozen seal at other times.

Our worst trouble with the dogs came from far away—­probably from Asia.  There are references in Scott’s diary to four dogs as attacked by a mysterious disease during our first year in the South:  one of these dogs died within two minutes.  We lost many more dogs the last year, and Atkinson has given me the following memorandum upon the parasite, a nematode worm, which was discovered later to be the cause of the trouble: 

“Filaria immitis.—­A certain proportion of the dogs became infected with this nematode, and it was the cause of their death, mainly in the second year.  It was present at the time the expedition started (1910) all down the Pacific side of Asia and Papua, and there was an examination microscopically of all dogs imported at this time into New Zealand.  The secondary host is the mosquito Culex.

“The symptoms varied.  The onset was usually with intense pain, during which the animal yelled and groaned:  this was cardiac in origin and referable to the presence of the mature form in the beast.  There was marked haematuria, and the animals were anaemic from actual loss of haemoglobins.  In nearly all cases there was paralysis affecting the hindquarters during the later stages, which tended to spread upwards and finally ended in death.