PETA Says Sponsorship of Deadly Race Doesn't Fly After New Investigation Finds Dogs Crippled, Neglected, Run to Death
For Immediate Release:
May 8, 2019
Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382
Seattle – It won’t be pretty: PETA supporters will set up a “graveyard” of “dead dogs” outside Alaska Airlines’ annual meeting on Thursday to pressure the company to pull its sponsorship of the cruel Iditarod. The protest comes in the wake of PETA’s first-ever video exposé revealing extreme suffering on several high-profile mushers’ properties. The investigation found that even old and ailing dogs’ only protection—even when the wind chill dropped to 19 degrees below zero—were dilapidated, open-faced boxes or plastic barrels to which they were chained in the ice and snow.
When: Thursday, May 9, 12:45–2 p.m.
Where: Alaska Airlines Corporate Headquarters, 19300 International Blvd., SeaTac
“The dogs are fed rancid meat, raced even when their paws are cut and worn raw, and denied veterinary care when sick or injured—and some are raced until they die, after inhaling their own vomit,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is calling on Alaska Airlines to stop supporting cruelty to dogs by cutting ties with the Iditarod.”
PETA’s eyewitness investigation found that dogs, who are pack animals, were kept chained alone outdoors, day and night. Many had worn-down, raw, and bloody paw pads from frantically running in tight circles at the end of their short chains. Veterinary care was denied to dogs, including a former Iditarod champion with painful arthritis who was left chained up, limping, and crying on the ice and had no shelter at all and another dog who’d sustained a crippling spinal cord injury that left her dragging her hind legs. When a team of dogs broke free from a sled, one was killed while another was dragged for up to 2.5 miles, leaving the animal urinating blood.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.
