Iditarod fan wannabes at a European soccer match/Wikimedia Commons
Who fuels Iditarod behavior?
The greatest threat facing the survival of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race today is not the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA); the real threat is a relatively small group of rabid fans blind to the real world and the fact the self-billed Last Great Race lives and dies on the money provided by sponsors.
Never were those sponsors more important than now with Iditiarod insiders saying the race is once against hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and in need of some big-money backers.
But the event is no longer what British reporter Ian Wooldridge in 1977 labeled “the last great race on earth.” What would today be called harsh dog treatment was then acceptable. It was not unusual for dogs to die in harness in the race’s early years, and Alaska dog mushers busy breeding up new and better sled dogs at that time were busy pumping them out puppy-mill style and culling the pups that didn’t measure up.
Those days are gone. Times have changed.
American attitudes towards dogs have changed, as well. Dogs are now far more commonly “companion animals” than working animals, something the Iditarod accepted years ago when the race proclaimed “it’s all about the dogs.”
This is the standard the Iditarod is trying to sell in these times. It doesn’t wash in an event where dog drivers chose race results over dog care.
John Doe doesn’t bring his moose-stomped and crippled wife, brother, sister or friend into the house, dump them in a chair and then spend hours going about his more important business before deciding that maybe it’s finally time to take the injured to a hospital.
Enter Dallas Seavey
But this is pretty much what five-time Iditarod champ Dallas Seavey did with an injured dog this week. He would later explain to a sympathetic Alaska Public Media that instead of rushing his injured companion, who was reported to have a 20 percent chance of survival, to the nearest checkpoint where veterinarians could treat her, he left her zipped into his sled bag for three hours while he camped out with the rest of the team because, pick one:
- He was in shock
- He didn’t think the dog was hurt that bad
- His team was exhausted
The last excuse is ridiculous. Seavey’s team was only two hours from the Finger Lake checkpoint when he stopped. All mushers trying to win the Iditarod have teams trained to run an extra couple hours or more beyond their scheduled rest stops because later in the race skipping a rest is often how the race is won.
The second to last excuse would make the college-educated Seavey the only dog musher in Alaska – amateur or professional – unaware of the risk of serious internal injuries when a moose kicks or dances on a dog. That’s a little hard to believe.
As for the first excuse, if Seavey is going to go into shock because a moose stomped his team and he had to shoot the animal, he simply shouldn’t be in the race. This sort of disaster can be expected in the Iditarod and any musher who isn’t emotionally prepared to deal with it should stay home in the best interest of the dogs.
To believe any of these excuses, you have to be a Seavey fan, because the most logical explanation for his stopping to take a three-hour rest when he did – the explanation that best fits the evidence – is that he didn’t want to disrupt his team’s run-rest schedule (more on that below).
In fairness to Seavy, it is also possible, probably even likely, that he rationalized that the injuries to the dog were such that she wouldn’t die during the stop. And luckily for him and Iditarod, the dog did survive the wait and later emergency treatment in Anchorage.
None of this changes the fact that after the moose encounter, Seavey was still “racing” rather than thinking “all about the dog.”
A musher thinking about the dog would do what fellow five-time champ Rick Swenson, now retired, did back in 1990.
Then versus now
That was the year the then-four-time champ found himself in a situation similar to Seavey’s with a dog injured after a moose attack. Here is the report of what happened at that time:
Swenson, who was leading the Iditarod when he left McGrath would that year end up finishing seventh, about 15 hours behind the late Susan Butcher, who claimed her fourth and final victory. Swenson would, however, be able return with much the same team to notch his fifth victory the next year in the greatest Iditarod ever told.
When most of the competition was turning back because of a godawful storm in the Topkok Hills east of Nome in 1991, Swenson got out in front of his team and sometimes finding the trail only by the feel of the snow beneath his feet or the hint of sled-brake scratch marks on ice, he walked his dogs through the blow to victory.
Swenson, it can be fairly said, never demanded a dog team do anything he wouldn’t do.
The late Jerry Austin, long a friend of Swenson’s, once described the musher as a “stupid, old dog lover.” It was an apt description unrecognized by many race fans of his day because of Swenson’s often blunt and plain-spoken nature.
Swenson invariably said what he was thinking without any filter which turned some people off and alienated others, but among the mushers on the trail in his day, it was agreed he was the master of sled dog care and management.
Swenson always wanted to win, but his dogs always came first. In 1983, when Rick Mackey hit the Bering Sea coast with a sizeable lead in the race, Swenson, the defending champ, flatly told reporters in Unalakleet that he wasn’t going to push his team to catch Mackey because it would be asking too much of a bunch of dogs he expected to be back on the trail the next year.
It was this kind of thinking that allowed Swenson to notch 19 top-10 finishes along with his five Iditarod victories when dogs were less expendable than they would later become and still are today. It was this kind of thinking that helped Swenson’s famed lead-dog Andy to race for a decade and live to age 20. Today most dogs have careers that last only a few years.
Seventeen times, counting the five victories, Swenson finished in the Iditarod top-five by driving in this style. That record is likely to stand forever. Seavey, despite his five victories and a possible sixth one year, has nine top fives and has finished in the top-10, 11 times compared to Swenson’s total of 24 top-10 finishes.
A reality-TV-trained actor, Seavey is, however, a much better public showman than Swenson. He doesn’t, however, rise to the level of now embattled Iditarod-champ and three-time Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race winner Brent Sass, another one-time reality TV star who can turn on the tears seemingly at will.
There is a reason one of the unnamed, former dog handlers of Sass now accusing him of sexual assault claims she thought filing charges against him would be futile given his “sunshiney, heroic reputation.” The woman’s accusations may or may not be true. Sass hasn’t been charged with any crimes, and though the Iditarod booted him out of the race this year because of those accusations, it did so without any sort of investigation into the substance of the accusations.
But the claim to Sass’s “sunshine, heroic reputation” rings true because it applies to many Iditarod mushers. It goes along with the iconic status granted Iditarod in the 49th state. And most of the race’s top competitors play to the role.
Seavey is good at both posing as sincere about his “love” of his dogs and indignant about criticism of behavior, any such criticism being in his eyes unfair.
All of this appears to work wonderfully with his fans. Here was one typical reaction after Iditarod penalized Seavey two hours for failing to follow an Iditarod rule requiring mushers properly gut a moose if forced to shoot one to protect a dog team.
The rule Seavey violated was written by Iditarod to comply with an Alaska law that allows people to shoot moose in self-defense to protect their property (such as dogs) or their life. The legal requirements are that after such a shooting, the shooter must salvage the carcass and forfeit the meat to the state. The meat is then donated to a charity or those in need.
The Iditarod was given special treatment by the state in that it was allowed to become the party responsible for salvaging the carcass, the most time-consuming part of dealing with a moose kill. Iditarod subsequently wrote a “gutting” requirement into the rules so that mushers would only be required to remove a dead animal’s internal organs to prevent the meat of the carcass from spoiling before Iditarod got to it.
The Iditarod also has another rule with which Seavey should have been involved if, as he said, he had a “critically injured” dog in his sled when he arrived at the Finger Lake checkpoint. This is Rule 37, the race’s “Dog Care rule.” It says this:
“If a returned dog is in critical condition or a life-threatening condition, the musher
maybe held up to eight (8) hours for investigation.”
Seavey wasn’t held for eight minutes, let alone eight hours, to give Iditarod time to investigate what had happened back down the trail. Race records reflect Seavey spent six minutes in the checkpoint unloading the injured dog and grabbing gear before taking off on a nonstop run to Rainy Pass.
Iditarod records also reflect that Seavey ran his team for about six hours from the race start in Willow through the first checkpoint at Yentna (his stop there was timed at 4 minutes) before stopping to rest his team on the Yentna River short of Skwentna. He then blew through the Skwentna checkpoint (his stop there was timed at eight minutes) and ran about six hours, including the moose shooting, from his Yentna campsite to a new campsite approximately two hours out of Finger Lake, according to Iditarod.
It was there he camped for three hours before sticking to his pattern of blowing through checkpoints. After breaking camp, he made the two-hour run to Finger, stopped for six minutes – two minutes longer than in Yentna – and then took off on a three-hour and 16-minute run to Rainy Pass where he stopped to rest after having run about five and a half hours.
Simple math
The numbers here tell the story. The people who know Iditarod racing know what Seavey was doing. Seavey stuck to his run-rest schedule after the tragic moose encounter. He was racing, not worrying about an injured dog.
Some of his fans are no doubt ignorant of what went down. The knowledgeable ones, however, know and appear fine with it. The Iditarod is a race, and Seavey was racing. This is what you do in a race. Iditarod is not some “all about the dogs” adventure.
Unfortunately, this is the kind of thinking that has now pretty much killed greyhound racing in the U.S. And there isn’t all that much difference between greyhound racing and the Iditarod, except that in the latter event the dogs are required to travel much longer distances while towing a sled and a musher.
Iditarod wasn’t always like this.
This was once an event where men, women and dogs were involved in an adventure across the wilds of Alaska followed by a full-on dog race along the coast. There was a time when Iditarod mushers were even known to get out in front of the dogs on snowshoes to break trail or stop to cut brush to make crude “bridges” to get across open water on creeks.
This isn’t today’s Iditarod. Over the years, Iditarod racers and their fans have managed to turn the Iditarod into some sort of doggy NASCAR.
The dogs keep getting a little houndier every year because the hounds are faster than traditional Siberian huskies, and the racing now begins at the restart in Willow with the dogs expected to go full-on for 1,000 miles to Nome.
The toll of the pace is written in the many dogs that burn out after only a few years of competition. The best might last for five or six. As the race has gotten faster, more of the top mushers have committed to pushing teams ever closer to the edge in hopes of winning rather than worrying about saving the dogs to ensure a strong finish the next year or, with a little luck, a win.
Seavey has managed to avoid such crashes, but he finished the 2016 race with only six dogs left in harness. The other 10 with which he had started the race were dropped at checkpoints along the way because they couldn’t hold the pace.
Runing long distances is strenuous for man or beast, and the faster the pace the more strenuous it becomes. Iditarod veterinarians were concerned enough about the pace and what it does to dogs that in 1995 they convinced race managers to write a rule threatening that if a musher allowed “a dog to deplete its fat reserves to the point where it dies of exposure in a storm or dies from pneumonia or other secondary diseases” the musher could be banned from Iditarod for life.
The rule was later removed because too many top mushers were worried one of their fat-depleted dogs might die along the coast. Underweight dogs are now on the list of things Iditarod doesn’t talk about, but many mushers are well aware of the problem and the risks cold weather and wind can pose for skinny, short-haired dogs.
While Phillips and Porsild were taking shelter, Iditarod was busy rescuing other mushers and teams in part because of fears a dog or dogs might die in the storm, and yet Iditarod subsequently penalized the two women for what they did.
Sometimes it almost looks like Iditarod and some of the race’s top competitors are trying to help a few hundred thousand diehard fans who don’t care much about dogs turn The Last Great Race into the last of the north’s 1,000-mile dog races.
The other 1,000-miler, the Quest, died in 2022 due to a disagreement between U.S. and Canadian race managers. The Canadians wanted to more than double the requirement for the minimum hours of dog rest during the race and add another vet check. Alaska mushers were opposed.
Frank Turner, a former Quest champ and a longtime advocate for better dog care, told the CBC that the issue came “down to a real conflict in values.” Turner first recognized northern mushers were in a public relations battle for their lives after the film “Sled Dogs” aired in 2016. He subsequently began lobbying for mushers to create a more dog-friendly image.
Seavey apparenlty didn’t get the memo. As a consequence, he passed up a golden opportunity to bless the Iditaord with a PR goldmine. Imagine if instead of racing for another victory, he’d turned around to create this story:
“Five-time Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race champ Dallas Seavey today turned back to the race’s Skwentna checkpoint to save a dog injured when a moose attacked his team. Race officials said the move has put in jeopardy his chance at winning at record sixth Iditarod, but Seavey told reporters he wasn’t even thinking about that.
“‘My dogs come first,” he said. ‘My only thought after Faloo was injured was finding the closest vet (veterinarian) as soon as possible to get her treated.’
“Seavey said he was thankful none of his other dogs were injured before he shot and killed the moose, which the Iditarod subsequently butchered so the meat could be delivered to the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage to feed patients who miss their traditional diet.
“I don’t think we have much chance of contending for victory in Nome after this,” Seavey added, “but the race isn’t even to halfway; so we’re going to press on. Who knows? Maybe a big storm will blow up on the Bering Sea coast to stall the leaders, and we’ll be back in the thick of it.
“But the main thing here is that Faloo will live to fight another day.”
But instead of the Iditarod getting this heart-warming story, Seavey provided more ammunition for animal-rights activists trying to defund the Iditarod, and his fans are patting him on the back for behaving the way he did because, as has been said, “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”
It could also well be the thing that finally kills the Iditarod or bankrupts it. What major corporate sponsor in these times wants to put money in a race where the dogs are treated as expendable?
Categories: Commentary, Outdoors
I think this highlights the need for the Iditarod to evaluate the rule on using the SOS button on the trackers. Perhaps Dallas should have been able to get emergency help without being disqualified. In situations like this, where a dog’s life could be saved wouldn’t it be better to allow mushers to use their tracker without the worry of ending their race? That way, even if Dallas thought the injuries were not so severe that he could go on to the next CP, he could just hit the button and have a vet meet them head on much sooner by snowmachine.
Dallas had an InReach with texting ability. It’s way better than pushing a button. He didn’t ask for a vet.
Apparently word is out there and if Iditarod doesn’t clean up its act, there’ll be even fewer participants than this year’s 38. I am a booster of Matt Failor, Aaron Burmeister and a few of the other “real”mushers who put the health and welfare of their dogs first and foremost.
ccv
So the real question is why wasn’t Dallas disqualified for allowing pain and suffering to his dog .
He carries a sat phone and has race officials on speed dial they could have sent a snowmobile or helicopter for his badly injured dog . Getting a rescue response within a couple hours and that would have freed him up to properly butcher the moose thus complying with state law and the rules that no musher may pass until the moose is gutted. Thats a strong rule.
There is also a rule that mushers must not allow pain and suffering or contribute to it .
One simple legal phone call . To the race marshal.
Dallas should 100% be disqualified without doubt.
He put the dogs in danger. He broke state law .
Also he broke the Iditarod rule against doing anything bad that shines a poor light on Iditarod like brent sass got kicked out for .
Dallas is equally guilty of misconduct towards the race .
Dallas gets all the breaks from officials. Why ?
When he drugged his dogs they gave him a pass .
The fired the lead drug tester to get the seaveys to come back . Pretty twisted really.
Maybe I’m jaded, but I still feel accountability carries some weight.
An underwhelming trend today seems to be toward flamboyant spin. Throw out some righteous propaganda, then go about your business. Plant a sensational image, and cultivate a following of couch wannabes.
Why not? This is America, and capitalism rules. Unfortunately, whatever makes a buck is fair game, and there’s enough gullible lemmings out there eager to keep a flashy boat afloat.
We all need something to believe in. It would be nice if there was a better balance between basic integrity, morals, and perhaps in this case, dog care, and feeding ego driven economic engines.
To each his own. If everyone was the same, things would get boring. – Let’s not loose sight of the value of taking the high road. It’s a choice. One that is tested by time. – Rick Swenson probably sleeps very well at night.
Honor the good eggs. Send them good energy. In my mind, they’re the overwhelming majority and true spirit of the race.
It is what it is. Rest easy and trust in karma. What goes around, eventually comes around. – Dare I say; every dog has his day…
I read Seavey’s fans’ responses on his Facebook page and they were for the most ignorant, emotional comments about how he was being unfairly penalized. Glad you wrote about this.
Finally someone said the hard part out loud: the race is too fast. Plenty of OG Iditarod mushers agree. Go to a late stage check point, look at those creaky, sore (SO SORE) dogs and tell me they are doing it because “They love it!!!”
Craig, I’m not sure you’re correct about culling. Would put money on it still being commonplace.
Incidentally, many European countries have dog care laws requiring, among other things, socialization and release from tethers for a period of time every day . I’ve inquired, and these laws apply to dog teams as well. Not sure how enforcement is applied, but that’s real dog care.
Jim: I’d expect there is still some culling going on. In both the Brent Sass and Dallas Seavey kennels, handlers have complained of puppies from unwanted pregnancies being killed or left to fend for themselves with the idea that if they die fine if they’re tough enough to survive maybe we’ll give them a tryout.
But there’s nowhere near the focused overbreeding of dogs to provide a pool from which to selection the best and then the slaughtering of a bunch of the others. And most mushers now are pretty good about finding rehoming Iditarod dogs that have outlived their usefulness as speedy sled pullers instead of putting them down as once was the practice.
Do you eat steak? How many animals are slaughtered in breeding programs to produce the best steak? I’ll bet you aren’t of the same mind when it comes to the animals you eat. It seems like you side with PETA only when it comes to the species you are writing about here. Yet you are fine with the big ag practices putting food on your plate? Hypocrisy much?
Tracy: I think the pertinent question would concern dog, not steak. Have you eaten dog?
I have, but I still don’t think of dogs and cattle as the same. Does that make me a hypocrit?
“………Go to a late stage check point, look at those creaky, sore (SO SORE) dogs and tell me they are doing it because “They love it!!!”………”
Back when Wasilla was a village without even a meter of fencing existing anywhere north of Anchorage, dog packs ran wild. It was a huge problem. We had a dog that would disappear for days, then return so exhausted that he’d fall asleep with his face in a bowl of dog food and sleep that way for a day or two. Dogs love to run. It’s what they do. It’s who they are. PETA and the cartoonists can recreate them to be children or Scooby Doo investigators for the reality tv or fantasy consumers, but not for those of us who co-habitate with wolves.
As a photojournalist covering the Iditarod for The Anchorage Times and Associated Press in 1985 (Libby’s year, an 18-day slog slowed by two snowstorms), I marvelled at the care Rick Swenson showered on his dogs. Yeah, he could be plain-spoken and gruff, but was good and fair to journalists if you didn’t ask him stupid questions. He was a true original, along with the other great mushing characters of those times.
Doug: Oh, Rick could sometimes get cranky about some good and legitimate questions, and we had more than a few “f— you,” “well f— you, too” conversations about “what you are you watching” over the years. But he was also one of the few Iditarod mushers of that time who ever said anything nice about the Anchorage Daily News coverage of the race or the reporters who covered it – Frank Gerjavic, who really helped put the race on the map in the early years; George Bryson, Doug O’harra, Kathleen McCoy, photographer Jim Lavrakus, Lew Freedman and others who were on the trail or in Nome for the finish in his era. He even once had some kind words for me about a story I wrote about his falling asleep in the Ruby washeteria while washing dog booties during, if my memory is right, the ’87 Iditarod. In retrospect, I suspect it must have been the only time he didn’t mind my watching.
My absolute favorite memory of Rick was a video of him entering one of the Yukon River checkpoints. He was greeted by a volunteer checker with a clipboard in one hand and a coffee mug in the other. They wanted the dogs in a specific location and the checker opted to put down neither the clipboard nor the coffee mug, and instead tried to push the team into the correct position by shuffling his legs against the dogs. The litany of profanity that Rick unleashed on him was a masterpiece and was pure Swenson: don’t be lazy, don’t be stupid, and above all – don’t put my dogs at risk.
That would pretty much be Rick. My favorite memory is of his stomping into the crowded little cabin at Rohn, shoving aside all the clothes drying over the wood-burning stove, and hanging up his dog harness to dry with no one having the balls to say, “Excuse me. What the f— do you think you’re doing.” If memory serves me right, Jasper Bond, who could be pretty protective of the limited space inside that cabin, was already the guy manning the checkpoint, and he didn’t even say anything.
My other favorite memory was of Gene Leonard’s wife sitting in their little cabin at Finger Lake badmouthing Rick for being the asshole he could sometimes be and Rick then stomping in there and bringing her a gift, which was something Rick did. All she could day after he left was “goddamn him, he can be the biggest asshole on the trail and the nicest guy.”
I’ll say it yet again, as I have for many years regards the Yukon Quest thousand mile race: It’s time to change the focus of the Race Rewards from ‘first across the finish line’ to a more complex notion of a reward for the best interaction between musher and team mates, a sort of ‘Golden Kennel Award’. It would be derived by the assessment of the Race Vets, the Race Marshal and their staff, the media, and the mushers themselves. You could still factor in the race standings too, but it wouldn’t be just about who got to Nome first. Yes, I know that this will be a hard one, but it is necessary. I will bet good money that ‘Golden Kennel Award’ (GKA) will garner more sponsorship money and more positive response than first across the finish does, and I think every dog will agree with me.
Oh yes, you can still have a large purse for the front finisher, but make the GKA and equal or larger dollar value.
I would love to see one of these Uber rich organizations offer up such a prize, maybe even PETA. Imagine what such a move would do to the status quo. And this prize would not necessarily need the sanction nor the blessing of the Iditarod. It could be offered outside the line. Revolutionary in the true sense of the word.
Thanks, Craig, for the anecdotes about Rick Swenson to show us how the race should be done. It takes someone who knows the Iditarod backwards and forward to be able to bring up such pertinent details from 34 years back. And to remind us that it was Alaskan Huskies that were supposed to be doing the race, not quasi-Greyhounds, yet that’s where we’re heading.
As a photojournalist covering the Iditarod for The Anchorage Times and Associated Press in 1985 (Libby’s year, an 18-day slog slowed by two snowstorms), I marvelled at the care Rick Swenson showered on his dogs. Yeah, he could be plain-spoken and gruff, but was good and fair to journalists if you didn’t ask him stupid questions. He was a true original, along with the other great mushing characters of those times.
Great post and certainly thought-provoking. I have supported the Iditarod for years, not knowing that all of these things were more common place. I wonder if most of the fans truly know these things or are they in the dark. Maybe part of the answer to this is for the fans to pressure the organizers and demand that the dogs be better protected. It is always difficult to see bad behavior, but more reliable reporting by the news media would help. No excuses for bad behavior, and penalties for continued bad behavior, including banning for life.
Having watched the Iditarod since it’s beginning, I can only wonder at what has happened to the race Joe Reddington conceived back in the day. It has morphed from something requiring real bush living skills to a dog driving competition. Today’s Iditarod more resembles the sprints favored by mushers like George Attla than the cross country exploits of guys like Herbie Nayokpuk. Perhaps as the race became more corporatized the change was inevitable.
Old George was pretty good at going cross-country, too. It’s just that he went to where the money was in his day and that was sprint. But having spent some time around in the backcountry, I can testify his Bush skills were first rate.
“Swenson, it can be fairly said, never demanded a dog team do anything he wouldn’t do.”
I just finished reading a few books on Harry Karstens & early mushing in Alaska…
It is nothing like this current made for TV circus we see on the Iditarod trail.
You are right that early mushers had to return the next year with the same dog team…
Not the case for Seavey Inc. Dallas even said in a video that he borrowed a few dogs from his dad’s lot after the incident up on the Denali highway killed & injured a few of his top athletes. This tragedy may have been avoided if Dallas was on the sled instead of a young inexperienced handler from the outside.
Back during the Karstens & “Burning Daylight” days of AK, most mail mushers started with 3 dogs and moved up to 5…a team of 7 was very large since you had to kill moose and net fish to feed these animals. There was not sponsors buying dry dog food from the lower 48 and shipping it up to your dog lot. Feeding two running dogs costs around $1,200 a year these days. Figure out what a dog lot of 100 costs so you can always have a fresh young dog to pull when you flatten one in training or on the racecourse. This event has run its course and nothing is proven out on trail by these corporate sponsored mushers who use up dogs like disposable batteries for their personal gain. Dallas proved once and for all that his dogs come last…we still haven’t heard a report on Faloo’s injuries or saw a picture since the moose stomping. Irod is trying to hide this & wait till after the race in case Dallas “WINS”.
Floor was home on the couch two days after the moose stomping. Yes I saw pictures.
That’s great. But what’s your point? That it’s OK to forego seeking treatment for a seriously injured dogs in the hours immediately after the injury because it might survive even if you don’t? And if it dies, so what? You have a good excuse to exlpain why that wasn’t your fault, right?