Please ask library to cancel pro-Iditarod event

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Background | From The Sled Dog Action Coalition

Clark Public Library in Clark, New Jersey, invited Iditarod musher Kim Darst to speak at the library on October 2, 2011. The Iditarod has a long, well-documented history of dog deaths, illnesses, and injuries. Please tell the library to cancel Darst’s talk.

Whom To Contact

director@clarklibrary.org ,

BoardPresident@clarklibrary.org ,

reference@clarklibrary.org ,

circulation@clarklibrary.org

Sample Letter

Dear Library Staff:

The Iditarod has a long, well-documented history of dog deaths, illnesses, and injuries, and I am respectfully requesting you therefore please cancel musher Kim Darst’s talk. During racing and training, dogs experience paralysis, frostbite, bleeding ulcers, bloody diarrhea, lung damage, pneumonia, ruptured discs, viral diseases, broken bones, torn muscles, tendons, and sprains, and death. At least 142 dogs have died in the Iditarod, including two dogs, from a doctor’s team, who froze to death in the brutally cold winds. For more information, please visit Sled Dog Action Coalition website at the following: http://www.helpsleddogs.org .

Furthermore, during training runs, Iditarod dogs have been killed by moose, snowmachines, and various motor vehicles, including a semi tractor and an ATV. They have died from drowning, heart attacks, and being strangled in harnesses. Dogs have also been injured while training via being gashed, quilled by porcupines, bitten in dog fights, and suffered from broken bones, and torn muscles and tendons. Most dog deaths and injuries during training are not even reported.

Iditarod dog kennels are nothing more than puppy mills. Mushers breed large numbers of dogs and routinely kill unwanted ones, including puppies. Many dogs who are permanently disabled in the Iditarod, or who are unwanted for any reason, including those who have outlived their usefulness, are killed with a shot to the head, dragged, drowned, or clubbed to death. “Dogs are clubbed with baseball bats and if they don’t pull are dragged to death in harnesses…” wrote former Iditarod dog handler Mike Cranford in an article for Alaska’s Bush Blade Newspaper.

Dog beatings and whippings are common. During the 2007 Iditarod, eyewitnesses reported that musher Ramy Brooks kicked, punched, and beat his dogs with a ski pole and a chain. Jim Welch says in his book Speed Mushing Manual, “Nagging a dog team is cruel and ineffective. A training device such as a whip is not cruel at all but is effective. It is a common training device in use among dog mushers…”

Jon Saraceno wrote in his March 3, 2000, column in USA Today, “He [Colonel Tom Classen] confirmed dog beatings and far worse, like starving dogs to maintain their most advantageous racing weight. Skinning them to make mittens… Or dragging them to their death.”

During the race, veterinarians do not give the dogs physical exams at every checkpoint. Mushers speed through many checkpoints, so the dogs get the briefest visual checks, if that. Instead of pulling sick dogs from the race, veterinarians frequently give them massive doses of antibiotics to keep them running. The Iditarod’s chief veterinarian, Stu Nelson, is an employee of the Iditarod Trail Committee. Since the Iditarod is his employer, do you expect that he’s going to say anything negative about it?

When they aren’t hauling people, the dogs are routinely kept on four-foot chains or tethers. It has been reported that dogs who don’t make the main teams are never taken off their chains. Because chaining is cruel to dogs, many jurisdictions have banned or severely restricted the practice. For more information about the cruelties of tethering, please visit http://www.helpsleddogs.org/remarks-abuseinkennels.htm#chaining .

The Iditarod, with all the evils associated with it, has become synonymous with exploitation. The race imposes torture no dog should be forced to endure, and I hope you decide to cancel any event that sanctions such torturous conditions.

Thank you.

NAME

See More:

• Compassion
• Animal Wrongs

i am a dog
i pull a sled
but i do not want
to end up dead
if i do not pull
i will be killed
so here i sit
in ice so chilled
and pull i will
do not hurt me so
i am tired and old
but i cannot run slow

Karen Lyons Kalmenson