Douglas Mawson, the leader and organizer of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, decided to take fifty Greenland dogs with him; he believed that number would be more than sufficient for the exploratory sledge journeys that he was planning to undertake during the year he planned to spend in Antarctica. Mawson favoured dogs over ponies because, although they could only pull a little more than their own body weight, their food could be supplemented with meat from the fauna of Antarctica and – if necessary – from other dogs, so they did not need the vast imports of fodder that ponies required to see them through an expedition. Mawson had been impressed by the enthusiasm of the dogs on the "Nimrod" Expedition when he had accompanied Ernest Shackleton to Antarctica. Both Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott were dubious of the advantage of dogs over ponies. Amundsen and the Arctic pioneer Fridtjof Nansen were passionate advocates and thought the British explorers had misunderstood how to employ dogs in the polar regions; Amundsen pointed to their successes in the Northern Hemisphere and the relative ease of handling dogs compared with ponies, especially in heavily crevassed areas where a fallen dog could often be easily retrieved but a fallen pony was usually lost. The Norwegians were thoroughly utilitarian in their approach to dogs though; although they could be affectionate with the animals, there was little thought given to their survival when they had outlived their usefulness. Scott had used dogs on his "Discovery" Expedition and had felt it badly when he had been forced to kill them all during his southern sledging journey. Nevertheless, his attitude towards dogs was similar to Amundsen's and Mawson's: