For Immediate Release:
December 9, 2021
Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382
Englewood, Colo. – This morning, PETA purchased stock in locally based Liberty Broadband in order to push its subsidiary GCI, an Alaskan internet service provider, to stop sponsoring the Iditarod dog-sled race, in which more than 150 dogs have died.
While nearly every other major sponsor has cut ties with the Iditarod—including Alaska Airlines, Chrysler, Coca-Cola, Jack Daniel’s, Wells Fargo, and, most recently, ExxonMobil, which ended its support after the 2021 race—GCI is still sponsoring it, to the tune of more than $250,000 every year.
“The Iditarod forces dogs to cross nearly 1,000 miles of icy, windy terrain in under two weeks, running some to their deaths,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA looks forward to attending and speaking at Liberty Broadband’s annual meetings to push the company to stop bankrolling cruelty to dogs.”
Up to half of the dogs who start the Iditarod don’t finish it. During the 2021 race, nearly 200 dogs were pulled off the trail because of exhaustion, illness, injury, or other causes, leaving the remaining ones to work even harder. The leading cause of death for dogs on the Iditarod trail is aspiration pneumonia—caused by inhaling their own vomit—and the race’s official death toll doesn’t include countless others who were killed simply because they weren’t fast enough or who died during the off-season while chained next to dilapidated boxes or plastic barrels in the bitter cold, a practice exposed in a PETA undercover investigation.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
