Iditarod.com
Iditarod PR badly, badly botched
The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, an event that claims to be “all about the dogs,” this week disqualified a musher who was all about the dogs, lied about disqualifying her, and tried to cover up the reason for her returning to a checkpoint to seek veterinary care for a dog that collapsed.
The musher who turned her team around and returned to the Tanana checkpoint on Wednesday was Brenda Mackey, heir to a famous Iditarod name that doesn’t carry the weight it once did in Iditarod circles.
Mackey saved the dog, but is now out of the race.
In a Facebook post, she indicated she is generally OK with being disqualified given a moment of panic that led her to push a “rescue button” on a GPS satellite tracker in her sled.
Calling for a rescue is, according to Iditarod rules, grounds for disqualification, but in this case, there was no rescue. There wasn’t even an effort to stage a rescue because the call for help was for unknown reasons never received, which raises a question that must be asked:
If a musher pushes “the button,” as it is called, but the message goes nowhere, was the button truly pushed? Iditarod mushers have been known to get very confused due to fatigue on the trail. Many have talked about their hallucinations over the years.
It’s not impossible that Mackey only imagined that she pushed “the button” despite her statement indicating she is clear as to what she did.
“I knew I’d be disqualified once I pushed my button, but in that moment of urgency I just wanted help for (the dog),” she wrote in a Facebook post. “However no one knew I’d pushed it. I heard three different reasons why that might be.
“Either it didn’t work as I’m told has happened before, or I didn’t push the correct button and was told the SOS just goes to a call center (?); that I should’ve pushed an emergency button instead (which I didn’t take note of when I got the tracker out); or I didn’t hold the button down long enough.
“I pushed it five times in a row to really drive home I have an emergency. That was my logic and there’s no indication in a change in the blinking red light so I just kept pushing it. Apparently there’s no record of any activation.”
Rules and rules
Given this, Iditarod – which has a well-documented history of bending its rules – could easily have let her stay in the race. An old court ruling actually says it is perfectly fine for the race to ignore its rulebook.
In this case, Iditarod forced Mackey out of the race because she admitted pushing the button even if it didn’t work, and promptly issued a statement that said this:
“Rookie Iditarod musher, Brenda Mackey (bib #9), of Fairbanks, Alaska,
scratched at 4:35 p.m. today at the Tanana checkpoint in the best interest of her team. Mackey had 14 dogs in harness when she arrived in Tanana, all in good health.”
The statement contained multiple inaccuracies or what might be called “lies.”
Iditarod would two days later amend the statement to more accurately report what happened and apologize “for the miscommunication and any angst we may have caused Brenda, her team and her followers.”
But the race offered no explanation as to how the mistake happened, thus providing more ammunition for the Idiatrod-hating People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to go on the attack.
PETA accused Iditarod of trying to cover up “a serious dog emergency,” noting the original media statement, the revised statement that came after Brenda posted on Facebook, and the fact an Iditarod live stream camera in Tanana “cut audio and panned away from t dog in the bag” when Mackey unexpectedly returned to the checkpoint.
Iditarod could easily have spun this the other way by honestly stating what had happened, commending Mackey for saving the dog, and letting her continue along this year’s unusual trail to Nome.
But, as some have said, this is the Idiot-a-rod.
Different treatments
Instead of ignoring the button rule, especially given the unique circumstances surrounding its failure, and rewarding Mackey for doing what was best for her dogs, the Iditarod gave her what might be considered the standard “back of the pack” (BOP) treatment for rookies who are not reality-TV stars or Twitteratti (or whatever the people on X with hundreds of thousands of followers are now called).
Not even being an heir to one of the most storied names in Iditarod history could help her in the new Iditarod order of 2025.
Gone are the days when Brenda’s fun-loving, hard-partying uncle Lance was a darling of Iditarod fans. He won four Iditarods in a row from 2007 to 2010 and later cemented his Alaska outlaw reputation by heading from the race to drug rehab in 2020.
Idit-a-world mourned his sad and early death only two years later.
By then, the 1983 Iditarod win of Lance’s half-brother Rick – Brenda’s dad – was largely forgotten, lost in the glow of Lance’s success after being first buried beneath the women’s wave of Iditarod mushers that hoisted the self-proclaimed “Last Great Race” onto the international stage in the 1980s.
Butcher was the race’s dominant force through the rest of the 1980s, winning four times between 1986 and 1990 and leading many people Outside, as Alaskans refer to the rest of the world, to think of the Iditarod as “that race some woman always wins.”
Butcher was also the last woman to win the race, which was destined to see the rise of other dominant male mushers culminating in the dominance of Lance and then the Seaveys in the form of two-time winner Mitch and son Dallas, the race’s only six-time winner and one of Alaska’s reality-TV stars.
By the time the Seaveys took over Iditarod dominance, Lance’s star was rapidly fading and the status of the most-remembered member of the Mackey family was shifting back to Brenda’s grandpa Dick, whose dramatic, photo-finish win over Rick Swenson in 1978 is enshrined in the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame.
But that now ancient history was of no help to Brenda when she returned to the Tanana checkpoint to put herself at the tail-end of the race with a dog in the basket needing the attention of a veterinarian.
So the Iditarod dropped the hammer on her, a move almost the opposite of what happened last year when Dallas Seavey shot a moose that attacked his team, failed to salvage it as required by race rules, and despite having a badly injured dog in his sled decided to stop an hour and half down the trail to give his team a scheduled three-hour rest so as to avoid interfering with his chances of winning the race.
The dog, luckily for the Iditarod, was reported to have survived rather than arriving dead in Seavey’s sled at the next checkpoint. Seavey was assessed a token penalty of two hours for breaking the rules and went on to win the race and prove that sticking to one’s race schedule is important.
Brenda ignored her race schedule and turned her team around to get to the nearest checkpoint.
The dogs matter
This she said is why:
“I left Tanana and stopped to snack after 26 miles. Everyone seemed totally normal. I went another mile and noticed Jett moving peculiarly in her backend though still pulling.
“The night before I’d asked the vet in Tanana to double-check her because she seemed ‘off.’ She checked out fine. I should’ve listened to my gut and sent her home. I stopped to look at her and she was rapidly panting with her front legs shaking/trembling also very rapidly. I took her off the line and she collapsed. I got out my dog bivy sac and put her into it.
“At that moment I decided it might be faster to turn around and run the 3.5 hours back to Tanana to get her to a vet. She seemed revived after a couple hours along the way and looked normal back in Tanana. She was sent to Anchorage for more extensive care. Her bloodwork came back with a highly elevated ALT and her temperature was still high all day yesterday.
“…The vets in Tanana felt it was a cardiac-related event based on my description of what happened. They described it as the electrical in the heart turning off and on. I felt very fortunate she’d revived. It’s hard to say what happened to her and we may never know. She’s always been a strong and solid athlete and to say it was shocking to see something like that happening would be an understatement.”
Brenda should not have been shocked. Anyone who spends enough time around dogs engaged in athletics – hunting dogs, sled dogs, field trial dogs, even dogs involved in hiking, running or mountain-biking with their owners – is destined to witness a worrisome collapse, as she did, or a death.
Dogs are relatively short-lived animals prone to accidents and bad luck. Back in the day, Iditarod veterinarians used to point to the statistical reality that if you impounded 1,000 to 1,200 dogs for two to three weeks or more, one of them would likely end up dying for some reason.
The problem is that the Iditarod is no longer a two- to three-week event or longer; it is closer to one- to two-week event. And it no longer attracts a field of 1,000 to 1,500 dogs.
There were but 603 last year. Three of them died. The race was won in a time of just over nine days and completely finished in a time of just over 12 and a half days. The death of so many dogs in such a small field on the trail for such a short time went unexplained during the event, and the Iditarod didn’t seem all that concerned after.
It waited seven months before finally offering the view that the deaths could not be explained. The necropsies of the dogs were never released for independent veterinarians to consider whether they could find some explanation.
It was not a good look. It is not a good look.
There is, however, a valid argument to be made here that the race simply hit a spate of bad luck. It began the decade with four straight, death-free races.
The death rate since the start of the decade through this year, which isn’t yet over, is one death on the trail for every 928 dogs starting the race, which is actually a little better than the average death rate of one dead for every 898 dogs in the 2010s.
But there’s a catch. The dog death count for the 2020s includes two dogs that got loose in Anchorage and were killed after being hit by motor vehicles and another dog that was killed by carbon monoxide while in a plane while being flown back to Anchorage.
If you limit the 2010s to deaths on the trail during the race, the death rate drops to one for every 1,199 dogs on the trail or right around what the vets used to say they’d expect if they tried to manage a big pool of non-racing dogs.
But it gets worse. Two of the dogs in the 2010s died in the team of Lance Mackey in 2015 when he was dealing with serious health issues and probably shouldn’t have been on the trail at all.
“The reality is my body is not somewhat cooperating with me,” he confessed to an Anchorage Daily News reporter that year. Had the musher been anyone other than Lance, the Iditarod would almost surely have cajoled or manipulated him or her into scratching.
Remove these two dogs from the data, and the death rate for the 2010s falls to one for every 1,540 dogs on the trail. And then there is the case of musher Katherine Keith, who was on the runners when a dog died in her team along the Bering Sea coast in 2017 and again in 2018.
Some mushers had questioned Keith’s dog care skills beginning with her rookie year, but Iditarod undertook no formal review of the dog the death in 2017 before her entry into the 2018 race because she was the partner of 2011 Iditarod champion John Baker.
Had Iditarod required Keith to sit out a year after the first dog death, the on-the-trail dog death count for the 2020s would have fallen to six among approximately 10,780 dogs or one per 1,797 dogs.
No reasonable person wants any dog to die in any Iditarod, but to expect that to be the case is foolish. Animals – including human animals – die in competitive athletic events. It’s a reality.
They were mainly running races of 40 miles or shorter. So they were running a lot less distance than the 1,000-mile Iditarod. If one corrects the death rate to account for running Iditarod-equivalent mileage, it rises to .25 per 1,000.
The Iditarod – despite four, death-free races with starting fields of near or more than 1,000 dogs in the early 2010s – never got its death rate that low. But the rate was approaching 0.5 per 1,000 if one considers deaths that could likely have been prevented by better race management.
That’s not bad. And it is unreasonable to expect a death-free race every year in a world where dogs engaged in exercise die all the time.
Reality
Researchers in the United Kingdom in 2020 reported that among dogs in that country “exertional heat-related illness (HRI) is shown to result in almost ten times the health welfare burden for dogs compared with vehicular HRI.”
HRI is what is commonly called heatstroke, and in this country has a nasty reputation for killing dogs left in closed motor vehicles on warm, sunny days.
But heat stroke also kills a lot of dogs hiking, running or biking with their owners. I have known a number of Alaska hikers and runners who have had dogs die of heatstroke despite Alaska being America’s coolest state.
And I have personally dealt with a Labrador retriever that collapsed from heatstroke when we were running, had to be carried home, was put in an ice bath to try to rapidly cool him down, subsequently lost control of his bowels and vomited, at which point he was rushed to a vet to be put on IVs.
Thankfully, he recovered. I have also twice had young dogs suffer unexplainable collapses similar to those described by Brenda. In both cases, they were carried back to my truck to be rushed to the nearest veterinarian 40 and 50 miles away, and in both cases had largely recovered by the time a veterinarian was reached, leaving the vet scratching her head to explain what had happened.
Both went on to live long, exercise-filled lives that lasted 13 to 16 years.
And just last fall, I had an 18-month-old dog collapse apparently due to exertion and hypothermia while jump-shooting waterfowl in flooded marshes at the end of Turnagain Arm.
The UK researchers noted dogs under two years old and younger have increased odds of HRI, and it would appear of cold-related illness as well. Not to mention higher odds of sudden collapse in general given the experience of Iditarod mushers who thought they could race two-year-old dogs in recent years
In my case, part of the reason for Hugh’s collapse was that his youth and enthusiasm clearly led him to work too hard, and it probably didn’t help that the day was cold and he was working without a protective neoprene jacket to help insulate his body against cold water.
On the day he collapsed, my smart watch recorded I’d covered about four miles of ground in about three hours without a stop except for a minute here and there to retrieve ducks and stuff them in the backpack.
The 45-minute-per-mile walking pace was indicative of the terrain. My pace is normally in the range of 15 to 18 minutes on good, level trail. There is no way of knowing Hugh’s pace or distance traveled, but given all the rapid, back-and-forth work he was doing in front of me in his search for ducks, he had to have traveled five to 10 times the distance I did, or 20 to 40 miles, and at a higher pace with some long swims across lakes full of water near 40 degrees or colder to retrieve the half-dozen ducks shot on the day.
When he started to wobble, I tried to hike him out to the road only to have him collapse about 10 minutes later. There was no choice but to load him in the backpack.
Hugh, as had his predecessors, recovered from his collapse in a warm car on the drive back to Anchorage and was able to bound out of it almost as if nothing had happened when we got home, which was a relief for someone who was worried sick upon sliding a dull-eyed dog into the back of a hatchback.
But this is what happens in sports. It happens to dogs just as it sometimes happens to people. I once had a friend similarly collapse on a long march across Alaska’s North Slope.
He was fading fast when we called a rest stop to cook hot soup and tea. He fell asleep half in a creek while the third member of our party and I were cooking. Thankfully, he was wearing a drysuit. Still, we worried for a moment that he might have died.
But we managed to wake him up and get some hot fluids in him. Shortly thereafter, we camped for the day, ate, drank some more, and then went to bed. He was better in the morning, but had not recovered as quickly as dogs often do.
What should have been an easy hike of three miles or so across Barter Island to the village of Kaktovik proved a struggle for him and painfully slow for those accompanying him. Hugh, on the other hand, was raring to go a day after his collapse but was kept home like an Iditarod dropped dog waiting to be flown back to civilization.
His collapse was a reminder that “Exercise Is Medicine,” but as with any medicine, it is possible to overdose. Still, on balance, exercise is far better for dogs than lack of exercise.
Running the Iditarod is better for many of the dogs that run the race than living the life of ease now helping to fuel an epidemic of obesity and obesity-related metabolic syndrome among both dogs and cats in this country.
And the dogs really don’t care if they die during the race. They’re not being beaten to death or dragged to their deaths. They’re dying after collapsing in the midst of running. For all any of us can know, this might be the way any active canine wants to go out.
But even if that is the way a dog want to depart this earth, dogs dying in the so-called “Last Great Race” is an Iditarod problem because it doesn’t look good in a country where most dogs are pets.
And if Iditarod is going to survive, it needs do a better job of showing it truly cares about the dogs. Simply claiming to be “all about the dogs” is meaningless unless actions are taken to back up the claim.
Commending Brenda Mackey for what she did and ignoring any issues surrounding “the button” would have been one way to do this and instead the Iditarod decided to lie and cover up as if dogs never collapse on the trail.
The “optics,” as it is said, are terrible.
Categories: Commentary, News, Outdoors
Three comments: First, for me the real sign regarding how much the dogs love running the Iditarod is their coming back multiple times. And it’s not like they forget. Indeed, if a musher stops twice at the same spot on the trail, they’re not getting past it on a third run. Second, as Craig points out, we knowingly risk our lives for
Thoughtful timely column as always. Thanks for clarifying Brenda’s “help” button problem, another technology fail on the trail. Credit her with doing everything possible to save that dog, turning around, racing for help rather than charging forward to retain position. As usual Idit officials come down hard, rather than support a veteran racer, dealing with serious trouble, who put that her dog’s welfare first around.
The tech fail falls on race organizers and officials, what it this had been a musher in need of rescue?
I think Iditaraod is still with Spot, and Spot has some problems in AK. The company now promises full Alaska coverage, but warns that “Actual coverage may vary. Success rates are forecasts for a SPOT messenger to successfully deliver a single message during a 20-minute period, based on network availability. Additionally, in everyday conditions it is normal for some messages to be blocked by your environment, such as hills or buildings.” This shouldn’t have been a problem where Brenda was, but who knows.
But I don’t think there’s any argument that the Iridium satellite network has better Alaska coverage than the Globalstar network used by Spot.
I have long been “over” the arbitrary doling out of “rules” by the ITC. I’m a recreational musher but I’ve handled for racing teams.
(By the way, Susan Butcher had Dave Monson follow her along every checkpoint to gain an advantage, as I’m sure you know.)
Like you said, Brenda returned because of a dog collapsing. But no one heard or saw an SOS button. It never happened. But then, she TELLS THE TRUTH AS SHE REMEMBERS and gets scratched for it. Meanwhile, like you sad, Dallas can ignore rules and get a slap on the wrist.
They follow their own rules when they feel like it.
Not a way to run an organization. It’s not fair.
Given the tenuous PR of dog sled races as they are, there should be no dog deaths. Yes, it may happen when you take a group of 1,000 pets at home in a period of a week to 10 days. But sled dog racing has to do better if it wants to continue. I know – not possible, even with extended rest times and mandatory rest. Dogs push themselves whether they’re hunting or running or pulling a sled. But something has to change. Maybe automatic disqualification if a dog on your team dies. It may not be the ‘musher’s fault’, but the sport needs to address what the public is saying. The public isn’t aware of the arbitrary rule following, but the sport needs to address that, too.
Thank you for your articles and for all of the information you seem to have in your head. Or all the work you do researching the topics. It is appreciated.
It is tiresome to see mushers blamed for deaths that vets could not foresee or explain. That is certainly not to say there have not been mushers who were reckless, negligent, or worse, but the ham-handed PR efforts of the Board have done nothing to help what has become an increasingly bizarre event