Out-U-Go! Pet Care Services Spurns Iditarod After PETA Appeal

Compassionate Company Nabs Vegan Chocolates for Pledging Not to Promote the Cruel Race

For Immediate Release:
April 1, 2019

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

After Out-U-Go! Pet Care Services gave a nod to the Iditarod in a recent newsletter, PETA informed the company that more than 150 dogs have died since the race began and that many dogs used in it incur stress fractures and develop pneumonia, viruses, bleeding ulcers, and other ailments. In response, Out-U-Go! pledged not to promote the Iditarod again, and PETA sent it a box of vegan chocolates in thanks.

“Out-U-Go! did the right thing in denouncing a race that forces dogs to run up to 100 miles a day until their paws bleed and their bodies give out,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “Every company that cuts ties with the Iditarod is helping PETA move one step closer to ending this extreme cruelty.”

A total of 235 dogs were pulled off the trail during this year’s Iditarod because of exhaustion, illness, or injury, and a dog named Oshi died two days after crossing the finish line, reportedly from aspiration pneumonia—meaning that she developed a deadly lung infection after likely inhaling her own vomit, which is the leading cause of death for dogs who don’t survive the race. During the off-season, many dogs languish at breeding compounds where they’re tethered or confined to small pens in all weather extremes—often with little more than dilapidated plastic crates or barrels for shelter. This type of isolation causes social pack animals extreme mental anguish. Those who are deemed unfit to compete may be killed in gruesome ways, including by being bludgeoned or shot.

Out-U-Go! joins several companies—including The Coca-Cola Company, Jack Daniel’s, State Farm, Wells Fargo, Costco, Maxwell House, Nestlé, Pizza Hut, Rite Aid, and Safeway—that have severed ties with the Iditarod, and PETA is now calling on Alaska Airlines, Chrysler, and Millennium Hotels and Resorts to follow suit.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—opposes speciesism, which is the human-supremacist view that animals are commodities. For more information, please visit PETA.org.